Hated Nation
Stan re-posts:
The dialogue in a federal courtroom here evolved into a healing balm, revealing a nation, the United States, that the world has grown weary of, and a growing number of aging Americans willing to serve time in prison to expose the cancer within.
Torture was again on trial in federal court in Tucson Monday, Feb. 4. But in dialogue that surprised those that packed the courtroom, the healing remedy of grace and understanding were combined with wisdom and the spiritual foundation for a better world.Two of the protesters of US torture arrived in court suffering from cold and sleep deprivation. Betsy Lamb and Franciscan Fr. Jerry Zawada, in prison awaiting trial, had spent the night in cold, bare holding cells. Those holding cells are where all inmates from the privately-run prisons in Florence wait all night before a court appearance.
Dressed in thin prison clothes in a cell without a bed, there is only a cold, stone floor to lie on.
Mary Burton Riseley, in a wheelchair and sick with the flu, appeared with fellow defendants Lamb and Fr. Zawada…
Josiah:
This was inspiring to read. Maybe it was naivete passing itself off as wisdom, but until recently I dismissed the controversy surrounding torture as a distraction from larger crimes, the sort of thing that gets criticized at the liberal end of the corporate media spectrum to generate the impression of dissent. I should have known better, being the son of a war vet and having been reading about the U.S. military/police clientelism on four continents for years now. But I just got back from a week in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, of all places. In the War Crimes Museum (in one of the many retrofitted French colonial buildings in the city), I visited the “tiger cages,” which were originally used by the French to guillotine nationalists, and were later used by the Din Diem regime (with dozens of US advisors) to torture and execute thousands of what would now be called “terrorists” and “insurgents.” I saw pictures of young women wasting away in a crowded prison cell, a young man being waterboarded by a US marine, and those were the ones who weren’t simply shot. This is obviously the tip of the iceberg, regarding the horrors that were visited on the Vietnamese people, and we can say the same thing about Iraq and dozens of other countries today. But after hearing Iraq veterans like Camilo Mejila describe the torture they were ordered to administer (sleep deprivation, etc.), and all the scandals, I’m convinced that the “secret prisons” we hear so much about are no better than these “tiger cages.” Perhaps you need to reach to a certain age to get the requisite sense of deja vu to have a bullshit detector that really works. (Here I imagine a jaded married couple reading the morning newspaper, and one of them saying, “Look, honey, they’re trying that one again. You’d think they would come up with something new.” And they both laugh.)
8 February 2008, 9:44 pm