Country Without Mercy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The Christmas season is a time to remember the unfortunate, among whom are those who have been wrongly convicted.

In the United States, the country with the largest prison population in the world, the number of wrongly convicted is very large. Hardly any felony charges are resolved with trials. The vast majority of defendants, both innocent and guilty, are coerced into plea bargains. Not only are the innocent framed, but the guilty as well. It is quicker and less expensive to frame the guilty than to convict them on the evidence.

Many Americans are wrongfully convicted because they trust the justice system. They naively believe that police and prosecutors are moved by evidence and have a sense of justice. The trust they have in authorities makes them easy victims of a system that has no moral conscience and is untroubled by the injustice it perpetrates.

Lt. William Strong, son of a military family, tired of his wife’s unfaithfulness and filed for divorce. The unfaithful wife retaliated by accusing Strong of rape. There was no evidence of rape, but Strong was deceived into a plea bargain. Once Strong entered a plea, he was double-crossed and given 60 years.

Christophe Gaynor took an adolescent skateboard team to New York City for a competition. One of the kids attempted to buy illicit drugs. Gaynor threatened to tell the boy’s parents, and the boy pre-empted Gaynor by accusing him of sexual molestation.
Gaynor was openly framed in the Arlington, Virginia, court system.

Americans, or, perhaps more accurately, some Americans, were horrified by the photographs showing the torture of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib by the U.S. military. The Senate Armed Services Committee has issued a report, which concludes that the torture policy originated at the highest level of the Bush administration. Those Americans with a moral conscience have reeled under further revelations – the torture of Guantanamo detainees, the transport of people seized by U.S. authorities to Third World countries to be tortured.

We have to ask ourselves, why American service men and women and CIA operatives delight in torturing people about whom they know nothing? It has been well known since the Stalin era that torture never produces accurate information. Yet, U.S. soldiers and CIA personnel jumped at the green light given to torture by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the U.S. Department of Justice. Why weren’t our soldiers shocked instead at the immorality of their leaders?

One answer is that the U.S. military no longer operates according to a code of honor. Military discipline in the traditional sense does not exist. The ethos of the U.S. military has degenerated into kick-ass macho. Major General Taguba, who, instead of covering up the Abu Ghraib scandal, attempted in his report to hold the U.S. military to its traditional principles, was forced to resign from the U.S. Army.

Another answer is that the work of torture, like police work and prosecutorial work, attracts brutal people who enjoy inflicting harm on others. The two Republican female U.S. attorneys in Alabama who framed Democratic Governor Seligman enjoyed ruining Seligman and bringing grief to his family.

Deborah Davies of the BBC’s Channel 4 undertook a four-month investigation of the torture of American prisoners inside American prisons. Videos taken by sadistic prison guards and videos recovered from surveillance cameras reveal horrible acts of torture and even of murder of prisoners by prison guards.

An American prison reformer told Deborah Davies, “We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.”

“Law and order conservatives” have a great responsibility for this evil. Just as “law and order conservatives” created hysteria among the people about crime, they created hysteria about terrorists. Hysterical people condone great evils and arm government with power in the mistaken belief that it will protect them.

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12192008.html

it for those that are privatized. And there will be more and more of it as time goes on.

As for military 'justice'. Ever since the execution of Eddie Slovik, that's kind of an oxymoron.

flesh-eating bug: necrotising fasciitis. Strange resonance that word, "fasciitis" has. How many citizens of the US and UK, not to speak of the citizens of America's empire in South America and elsewhere in the world, have suffered an early death, as a result of their fathomless greed; a greed (ir)rationalised on the basis of the pathological ravings of loonies, such as Friedman. And now there seems to be a real danger of this flesh-eating bug, this Depression caused by an anarchic, out-of-control right-wing, taking a whole lot more innocent people's lives in our own respective countries and elsewhere.

A great cartoon called, "Demented" by a Jacky Fleming in a "Mail on Sunday" supplement, today:

Man asks, "What do you give the man who's got everything - 2 yachts, a private jet, 4 ferraris, a chateau, a wine cellar?" Woman sitting, arms crossed, sitting at a table, frowning: "A tax bill...?"

Gee, there's a Republican called Cantor on CNN now, seems completely shameless. Barney Frank said the Republicans were warned to stop giving bad, sub-prime mortgages to people who couldn't afford them, but their bills were blocked by the Republicans. Cantor's reply: "Nobody wants finger-pointing!"!!!!! Precisely, the reverse of the truth. People want blood. And rightly so. "We were all asleep at the switch," Cantor unctuously intoned.

Barney had to reiterate again and again that the Democrats were not asleep at the switch, but their bills to remedy the crime-in-progress were repeatedly blocked by the Republicans.

The permanent grin on Cantor's face became increasingly strained and "fixed", while he burbled away, as he tried to cloud the issue, which only put him in a worse light. Cantor should never be allowed anywhere near government.

We fell for the "industry can do it better & cheaper" line. Now things like education, health care, infrastructure, air, water, food, things that are vital to our well being as individuals & a society, have been privatized. These things are now in the control of entities, whose well being does not depend on these things & whose main purpose is to create profit. It's a double whammy against We the People.

This was especially disturbing: “We’ve become immune to the abuse. The brutality has become customary.”

I would say that is a spot on assessment of American society as a whole.