The atrocities at Abu Ghraib are nothing new, we've being doing worse to our own citizens for years.
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/resources/torture/b...The use of sex and sexual humiliation as torture in Abu Ghraib and the other American prisons in Iraq is endemic to the American prison. Psychological and physical sexual torture is exacerbated by the underlying policy of denying prisoners any volitional sex, making the only two forms of sexual activity that are physically possible--homosexuality and masturbation--both offenses subject to punishment. Strip searches, including invasive and often intentionally painful examination of the mouth, anus, testicles, and vagina, frequently accompanied by verbal or physical sexual abuse, are part of the daily routine in most prisons. A 1999 Amnesty International report documented the commonplace rape of prisoners by guards in women's prisons.(2)
Each year, numerous prisoners are maimed, crippled, and even killed by guards. Photographs could be taken on any day in the American prison system that would match the photographs from Abu Ghraib that shocked the public. Indeed, actual pictures from prisons in America have shown worse atrocities than those pictures from the American prisons in Iraq. For example, no photos of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners have yet equaled the pictures of dozens of prisoners savagely and mercilessly tortured by guards and state troopers in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica rebellion.(3) Even more appalling images are available in the documentary film Maximum Security University about California's state Corcoran Prison. For years at Corcoran, guards set up fights among prisoners, bet on the outcome, and then often shot the men for fighting, seriously wounding at least 43 and killing eight just in the period 1989-1994. The film features official footage of five separate incidents in which guards, with no legal justification, shoot down and kill unarmed prisoners.(4)
But if the tortures practiced in American prisons are so commonplace, then why, one might reasonably ask, did those pictures from Abu Ghraib evoke such an outcry? The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the American prison and how the prison functions in contemporary culture.
Prior to the American Revolution, imprisonment was seldom used as punishment for crime in England and was rarer still in its American colonies. The main punishments under England's notorious "Bloody Code" were executions and various forms of physical torture--whipping, the stocks, the pillory, branding, mutilation, castration, etc.--all designed as spectacles to be witnessed by the public. The prison system, in contrast, institutionalizes isolation and secrecy. The prison's walls are designed not only to keep the prisoners in but to keep the public out, thus preventing observation or knowledge of what is going on inside. Unknowable to all but prisoners and guards, the prison thus becomes a physical site where the most unspeakable torture can continue without any restraint. And as an unknowable place, the prison can thus also become a prime site for cultural fantasy.
Emphasis mine.
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