Yet Another Dispatch from Uncle Sam's Gulag

In what has become a sickening routine typical of the rotten, criminal, capitalist ruling order that runs Sam's plantation, Amnesty International today released yet another report - this one for the UN Committee Against Torture - that revealed the grotesque human rights abuse of detainees held without charge in Sam's international Gulag Archipelago that stretches from Diego Garcia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Cuba. In their press release, AI reports:

The report reviews several cases where detainees held in US custody in Afghanistan and Iraq have died under torture. To this day, no US agent has been prosecuted for "torture" or "war crimes".

"The heaviest sentence imposed on anyone to date for a torture-related death while in US custody is five months -- the same sentence that you might receive in the US for stealing a bicycle. In this case, the five-month sentence was for assaulting a 22-year-old taxi-driver who was hooded and chained to a ceiling while being kicked and beaten until he died," said Curt Goering.

"While the government continues to try to claim that the abuse of detainees in US custody was mainly due to a few 'aberrant' soldiers, there is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of the torture and ill-treatment stemmed directly from officially sanctioned procedures and policies -- including interrogation techniques approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld," said Javier Zuniga, Amnesty International's Americas Programme Director.

The report also lists concerns surrounding violations of the Convention against Torture under US domestic law, including ill-treatment and excessive force by police, cruel use of electro-shock weapons, inhuman and degrading conditions of isolation in "super-max" security prisons and abuses against women in the prison system -- including sexual abuse by male guards and shackling while pregnant and in labour.

[Read the full report here]

Given the advanced stage of degenerate, raw-dog capitalism to which we on Sam's plantation find ourselves subjected, we must expect the Rumsfelds and the Clintons of the world to attack and ignore these and other reports. We also must assume that the White Supremacist defenders of the ruling order - the Savage Klansmen of the world - will vilify the messenger with a relentless passion.

These are diversions from the real issue - the brutal, bestial nature of Uncle Sam's ruling order. And we cannot allow them to get away with such behavior without paying a price.