Cowboy Culture ???

BJJ

One in every 32 adults in the United States was behind bars or on probation or parole by the end of last year, according to a government report Sunday that found a record 6.6 million people in the nation's correctional system. The number of adults under supervision by the criminal justice system rose by 147,700, or 2.3 percent, between 2000 and 2001, the Justice Department reported. In 1990, almost 4.4 million adults were incarcerated or being supervised.

Ajnag

yup, 1 quarter of the world prison population is based in the u.s.

land of the free im sure, and all that stuff, but basicly in cosying up to industry, the us govt needed someone to build the prisons, and people to put them in, hence the war on drugs, The reason america is refusing to consider liberalisation of drugs is because the extra cops,prisons, dea is now actually a substansial sector of the u.s economy.and despite all this, the u.s is still the one of the easiest places in the modern world to obtain drugs, illegal,legal and perscription.

pity truth wasn't an industry

TetsuoHashimoto

TexasGetting away with murder

Isabel Hilton
Tuesday November 21, 2000

The US has admitted its involvement in Latin America, but those responsible are immune
Last week, the US released 17,000 previously classified documents relating to CIA interference in Chile. The documents - many of them heavily censored - were released by the US state department, the defence intelligence agency, the CIA, the FBI and the justice department.
The "revelation" that the US helped to bring Augusto Pinochet to power by destabilising the government of President Salvador Allende can have come as a surprise only to those who have spent the last 27 years in a state of acute denial. (This includes, notoriously, substantial sections of the British Conservative party as well as many Chilean supporters of the right.)

A CIA memo prepared three years before the 1973 coup states: "If civil disorders were to follow from a military action, the USG [US government] would promptly deliver necessary support and material, (but not personnel)." In a state department memo written weeks after the coup that put Pinochet in power, Jack Kubisch wrote: "The junta does not appear to represent a threat to our major national interest. No overriding national objective seems to me to be served by supporting opposition to it."

George Bush pardoned Reagan, but what of Bush's own role? After heading the CIA, he was vice-president throughout the Reagan presidency then succeeded Reagan as president. On December 24 1992, 12 days before former secretary of defence Caspar W Weinberger was to go on trial, a trial in which Bush himself might have been called as a witness, Bush pardoned him and five other defendants. The criminal investigation of Bush himself was never completed.

Bush continues to enjoy his position as ex-president and respected father of the man who may well get the current presidential job. Justice and accountability, it seems, are strictly for export outside the U.S and Isreal.
The U.S. government continues to conceal its complicity in the decades long orgy of murder, torture and rape against hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
When bits and pieces of that history do leak out or are forced out by diligent journalists, the stories often are constructed narrowly, denied by the government or attacked by major media outlets. The larger picture is never brought into focus.

In Argentina, human rights activists continue to press for the identification of hundreds of children who were stolen from women "disappeared" by the military's Dirty War in the mid-to-late 1970s. Sometimes, the babies were literally ripped from the women's wombs by Cesarean sections before the mothers were sent to their deaths, along with as many as 30,000 other victims.
But the U.S. government continues to conceal its complicity in these crimes, as well as its role in the decades long orgy of murder, torture and rape against hundreds of thousands of civilians who perished in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration even supported the Argentine military as it trained the Nicaraguan contra rebels in Honduras.
Over the past year, however, evidence has dribbled out that the CIA and the Pentagon contributed directly to these and other human rights violations. In January, The Baltimore Sun discovered a 1983 CIA manual that taught psychological torture techniques to five Latin American security forces. "While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them," the manual coyly advised.

Yet, in the major U.S. media, the CIA's torture manual did not rate as front-page news. The Washington Post stuck its pick-up of the story on A9 and the New York Times ran its version on Al l. Both newspapers played up the fact, too, that the CIA had revised the manual in 1985 to discourage use of these "coercive techniques," although the methods were still described, including how to induce "physical weakness" by subjecting the victim to extremes of heat and cold and deprivation of food and sleep.
But the manual was only watered down in 1985 be cause of a controversy that erupted in October 1984 around stories that I wrote for The Associated Press on the ClA's so-called "assassination" manual for the contras. That "psychological operations" manual advocated "selective use of violence" to "neutralize" civilian opponents and arranging other deaths for political advantage.
The Baltimore Sun's new torture disclosures also follow the Pentagon's admission last year that the U.S. Army's School of the Americas used manuals that advocated torture, murder and coercion. Those Pentagon manuals were prepared in 1982 for training of Latin American officers at the school which has graduated some of the Hemisphere's worst human rights abusers, including El Salvador's "death squad" commander Roberto D'Aubuisson and Panama's Manuel Noriega. Clearly, these manuals were not isolated incidents, or simple "mistakes."
Indeed, the evidence points to conscious U.S. complicity in widespread human rights violations. Yet not a single U.S. official has been held to account for involving the United States in these serious offenses against humanity.
Ronald Reagan remains a Republican political icon, whose name will be affixed to a major new trade building in Washington. Yet, even before his election, Reagan was defending the Argentine military and minimizing its bloody reign. He declared in one radio commentary that President Carter's human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, "should walk a mile in the moccasins" of Argentina's generals before criticizing them.
Once in office, Reagan dispatched senior advisers to coordinate strategies with the Argentine dictators and South Africa's apartheid regime. He sent millions of dollars in weapons to the armies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras despite their wanton slaughter of civilians.
When the CIA-contra "assassination" manual surfaced in 1984, he dismissed it as "much ado about nothing."
Still, while the Reagan administration might have been particularly grievous, many of its predecessors share in the blame, too.
Currently, the African-American community is pressing for a thorough investigation into cocaine trafficking by the CIA-backed contras. Without doubt, U.S. officials implicated in the drug trade deserve punishment.
But in our view, the problem is even worse than that. What we see is a long-term pattern of collaboration with -- and cover-up of -- crimes that stagger the human imagination and shame the nation. Perhaps, the time has come for the United States to have its own truth commission, a body of citizens who will piece together the real historical record of the past half century.

Salvadoran Soldiers: We Were Ordered to Kill US Nuns
Weekly News Update on the Americas, 5 April 1998. Evidence that the 1980 rape and murder of U.S. nuns was done under orders.
US Releases Some Secrets on 1980 El Salvador Murders
Weekly News Update on the Americas, 28 June 1998. U.S.s secretary of state orders the release of documents on the 1980 rape and murder of four US nun. The US and Salvadoran governments have both insisted that the killings were carried out by four National Guard soldiers and one low-ranking officer on their own initiative

Of course, Carter's concern for human rights was outweighed by the US government's concern over a leftist or "revolutionary" leadership in El Salvador. US aid helped to prop up El Salvador's ruling party. For years, El Salvador's "democratic" government had been corrupt. In election after election, the ruling party "the PCN" had controlled the results and declared themselves victors. In 1972, the center-left opposition party "the UNO" was announced as the winner in the presidential elections. The government responded by blocking all news coverage, and, in two days, it was announced that the PCN had, in fact, won. Following the elections in 1977, which ended with the same result, protesters were shot down by the hundreds and the UNO was banished, its leaders exiled or killed, its followers targets for arrest, torture and death.

U.S. backs military dictator rulers of El Salvador.
70,000 Salvadorans dead. President Bush's aide, who personally handed over the list, was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North - later discredited for selling weapons to Iran to pay for the CIA's secret wars in Central America.

The war ended largely because Perestroika in the Soviet block forced the guerrillas to change their aims and opt for a democratic platform.

But the US only applied serious pressure on the government to negotiate after the rebels launched their largest offensive of the war in November 1989, showing that they were far from defeated.

At the same time an elite US-trained army unit murdered six Jesuit priests, the country's leading intellectuals, in cold blood.

The murders showed that after a decade of US instruction the army still had a lot to learn about human rights and democracy.

The priests were taken out of their house and repeatedly shot through the head with machine guns.

A US congressional investigation found strong evidence that the army's high command had ordered the murders, prompting a cut in military aid.

It is also suggested that the papers provide evidence that the CIA assisted in the assassination in Washington of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in 1976, in order to reinforce the rule of General Pinochet, who presided over a period of terror in Chile in which thousands died or disappeared.

The Gopher

The US prison population exploded in the 80s from 600,000 odd thousanbd to 2 million today.One reason is the mandantory sentencing policy on drugs.In most states a 5 year minimum is often imposed on crack coaine users.Since a fairly high proportion of crack users are black this helps them become more than 50% of the jailed population.But powder cocaine,a drug favoured by whites,has the 5 year minimum for possesion of way greater amounts of the drug.Threrfore,despite the fact that African Americans actually compose 1% less drug abusers than the general population(something like 12% of drug abusers are black,but blacks are 13% of the population)they use drugs with higer sentencing guidelines and therefore are sent to prison more frequently and in bigger numbers.For a great site
www.motherjones.com has a ton of figures and articles.

By the way if this stuff interests you watch Oz on Channel 4/TG4.Its set in a violent american prison and as well as being very entertaining it looks at some serious issues as well.Highly recommended-the narration is very interesting.

BJJ

About the Great USA
http://www.afn.org/~iguana/archives/1999_04/19990405.html
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/authors_al.html
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~pavr/harbury/archive/1996/062596c.html
http://www.uvm.edu/~wmiller/chomonterror.htm
http://www.uvm.edu/~wmiller/Imperialism.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/atzmon0822.html

http://www.zmag.org/interviews.htm
.http://www.connix.com/~harry/cia-jenn.htm
http://www.media-criticism.com/Guatemala_Nairn_1995.html
.http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/barsamian.htm
.http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Human_Rights/HRGuatemala_HarburyGx.html
.http://www.uvm.edu/~wmiller/venezuelancoup.htm
.http://www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~pavr/harbury/archive/cerigua/cwb07_97.html
.http://www.uvm.edu/~wmiller/shocked.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/10/096l-031000-idx.html
http://www.americas.org/country/country.asp?country=Guatemala
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/international/americas/18GUAT.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/1688569.stm
.http://www.intellnet.org/resources/american_terrorism/DeadlyDeceits.html
.http://www.media-criticism.com/News_Media_CIA.html
http://www.uvm.edu/~wmiller/campxray.htm

Dustaz

Thats really interesting.

Why is this on after hours?

Jesus, in the last few days weve had green issues, TV threads, Music threads, Humanites threads. Are you people too lazy to look at the other boards or something?

JacquesPompidou

People

Dustaz

Originally posted by JacquesPompidou
People

This post was brought to you by the letters W, T and F

tman

lol, guddun dustaz.

BEAT

suggestion, move this to the usa forum...fitting I think.

BJJ

Yeah good Idea.

But don't take this up wrong, I've worked in NewJeresy and I like the USA but right now there are many many things I love about it and 3 things that I hate about it.

1Gun Culture, I'm not sure of the numbers but deaths from firearms, accidental or homicide are very very high.

2G. Bushes Foreign policy , The man has not got a clue, the middle east, Pakistan, Iraq... it's all going to get worse

3Death Row, Although I don't strongly object to the death penalty I would prefer to see the USa use a more moderate aproach to its get Tuff on Justice. Canada and Japan have a death penalty.
But G. Bush has executed more people ( mostly Blacks and Hispanics) in Texas than Canada and Japan have since World war 2.