MIM scoop: Videotaping torture of naked prisoners originated in Pennsylvania prison:Abuse of Iraqi prisoners: the U.$. prison connectionby MC17 & MC5 On May 5 President Bush told the world that the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison is not typical Amerikan behavior. He said the soldiers who carried out the torture "don't represent America" and stated "This is a free country. We do not tolerate this kind of abuses." Bush made these statement in an interview aired on Al-Arabiya, a station widely viewed by Arab peoples. He also did an interview on the Amerikan Arabic propaganda station Al-Hurra, stating "...what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know."(1) But what took place at Abu Ghraib does represent Amerika. It is happening daily in prisons across the country, the country that has the highest imprisonment rate in the world. These statements by President Bush are exposed as nothing more than public image cleanup when we look at the conditions in Amerikan prisons. Two of the first seven soldiers caught torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison worked as U.$. prison guards before going to Iraq. Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick learned how to torture prisoners at Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn Virginia, after working there six years.(2) MIM Notes reported limitations of prison visitation and thefts of prisoner property in Buckingham in 1997. However, Virginia has imposed censorship on MIM before and we do not have as many details about prison conditions as we would like. Again, it's the same old story of cover-up. Charles Graner, another of the seven caught torturing Iraqis worked in a famous SCI-Greene Prison in Pennsylvania holding Mumia Abu Jamal. Graner is the guy smiling with arms folded in the torture photos. SCI-Greene also prohibits MIM Notes. On August 15, 1998, MIM reported this about SCI-Greene in Pennsylvania: "As a result of result of the brutal beatings inflicted upon prisoners (back here in the hole at SCI Greene) by guards, the grand wizard warden, Ben Varner had been terminated from his prestigious and luxurious position. Unfortunately the same people who removed him from office decided to relocate him to another prison within Pennsylvania. So now he's on the eastern side of the state implementing the same dirty tactics. Only now he's been demoted back to Deputy Superintendent."(3) Thus, in 1998, we already reported the important facts of life in Amerikan prisons: get slapped on the wrist and there is always another prison willing to take you and if you don't like that, then there is always the U.S. Armed Forces which will take you for torture abroad. MIM reported what appears to be the disciplining of someone referred to as "Grainey" by prisoners in 1998. That's not definitely a connection to "Graner" and prison authorities say privacy rules prevent them from saying if Graner was disciplined in 1998. On August 15, 1998, we reported the following about SCI-Greene: "Plus, according to the television news, 40 guards/predators are supposed to be FIRED! They have recovered videotapes of inmates being beaten down while NAKED! The inmates/POW's never did anything to cause these pernicious predators to assault them." Thus, the naked video thing came from SCI-Greene and has now been exported to Iraq! Graner worked at SCI-Greene from 1996 to today where he is still employed there.(4) Perhaps if SCI-Greene had not censored MIM Notes in 1997(5) and given us such a hard time and if the imperialist media were not so pig-headed reactionary, we could have struggled successfully to prevent the 1998 events in SCI-Greene--and maybe even Graner's role in Abu Ghraib, but the facts are that the U.S. prison authorities make it extremely difficult for MIM to do its work. To this day, SCI-Greene is censoring MIM. Documents from prison authorities at SCI-Greene justifying this cover-up and isolation of prison conditions can be found at our website. There are about 50 different documents on SCI-Greene at the MIM website thanks to all the horrors there.(6) In fact it should be no surprise that Abu Ghraib prisoners were tortured, as this is common in the Amerikan prison system in general where beatings, long term isolation, medical neglect, sexual assault, and humiliation are all part of a system that doesn't even pretend to offer rehabilitation or education. An Army investigation which resulted in criminal charges against six military police officers found a number of specific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Below we describe the findings and explain the similarity to daily conditions in prisons across this country. Abu Ghraib prisoners were punched, slapped, kicked and otherwise physically beaten by soldiers. This is typical day to day activity for prisons across Amerika where guards regularly beat prisoners and then file false reports accusing the prisoners (often shackled and held down by several guards) of attacking the guards to avoid any criminal charges for these actions. Abu Ghraib prisoners were left naked for days at a time. Some were videotaped and photographed. Some were arranged in sexually explicit positions or to perform sex acts for the photos. Prisons in Amerika have video cameras throughout, taping prisoners with and without their clothing on. Leaving prisoners naked is common practice, especially locked in solitary confinement, but also outside in cold temperatures. Full body cavity searches are also daily practices in Amerikan prisons serving only to humiliate and degrade prisoners. One naked Abu Ghraib prisoner was forced to stand on a box with wires attacked to his fingers, toes and penis. While we can't describe specific instances of this same form of torture in other Amerikan prisons, the idea is the same everywhere, it is only the tools used to torture prisoners than vary. At Abu Ghraib a male police guard had sex with a female prisoner. Sexual abuse by guards and by other prisoners is common in Amerikan prisons. Guards set up situations where prisoners will be raped by another prisoner, if the guards themselves do not commit the rape. This happens in both male and female prisons. These are just the abuses the military is willing to admit to in a report. Additional accounts of torture at Abu Ghraib include: Guards threatened prisoners with guns, beat them with brooms and chairs, sodomized one with a chemical light, poured phosphoric liquid on prisoner, and allowed military dogs to bite them. Again these are all common practices in Amerikan prisons. The form of torture may differ from one prison to the next, but the physical and mental abuse by the guards is common practice throughout this country's prisons. In California recent reports on the prisons have exposed conditions very similar to what was found at Abu Ghraib. These reports have even reached the mainstream media, with frequent stories appearing in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle describing the cover-up at the top of the California Department of Corrections that stopped investigators from looking in to brutal prison guards at Pelican Bay State Prison among others. This brutality has resulted in severe physical and mental injuries to many prisoners and even some deaths. A recent film from the California Youth Authority shows guards there brutally beating and kicking kids locked up in a facility there. And this guard brutality is on top of the standard conditions in Amerikan prisons which include control units where prisoners are locked in solitary confinement for years at a time in conditions that have been condemned by the United Nations as torture. For President Bush to claim that Amerikan doesn't tolerate the kind of abuses that happened at Abu Ghraib is a boldfaced lie. The criminal injustice system in this country is built on a solid foundation of torture. It is used as a system of social control. Whether trying to extract confessions or information, or just trying to degrade and break the will of prisoners, the tools used by the system include torture, humiliation, and degradation. Stories about these abuses can be found in the pages of MIM Notes every two weeks, in a section written by prisoners called Under Lock and Key. Occasionally they reach the mainstream media where politicians scramble to explain away the abuse as atypical and the fault of a few individuals (who often escape punishment as soon as the publicity dies down). What is unusual about Abu Ghraib is not the torture of the prisoners there but that the torture was exposed and that Amerikan officials are now forced to disavow it and even punish some individuals for what happened there. But punishment of individuals will not change the criminal injustice system. The more than two million people locked behind bars in this country know the truth of the daily torture that Amerika endorses as a condition of imprisonment. It will not change until we dismantle imperialist system that uses these prisons as a tool of social control.
Notes: To read detailed accounts of abuses of Amerikan prisons across the country visit: http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/agitation/prisons
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