America. Prison Nation. That's what we have become. Don't miss this editorial in Monday's New York Times, The Dark Side of America. The abuses at home are at least as bad, and probably worse, than those abroad.

The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees — and used by inmates who share needles — have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.

Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.

Say it isn't so...the Teamsters are pushing John Kerry to name Dick Gephardt as his VP candidate.

Meanwhile, Dennis Kucinich, down but not out, is still fighting for the Democratic nomination.

Last week we wrote about Lane McCotter, the former Texas and Utah prison chief whom Ashcroft picked to head up Abu Ghraib. The Houston Chronicle keeps the story alive, and says New York Senator Charles Schumer is asking Ashcroft for an investigation into how McCotter, who also headed up the Texas prison system during a "bad period" and some private prisons, got the job.

A civilian charged with preparing Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison for U.S. military use headed the Texas prison system during one of its most controversial periods and later resigned as director of Utah prisons after an inmate died while shackled naked to a chair....McCotter spent 18 months administering the Texas system, a period when prison violence made frequent headlines and Justice was threatening to fine the state as much as $1,000 a day if it did not make court-ordered improvements in the system.

....Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, is urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate how civilians such as McCotter were chosen to oversee the opening of prisons in Iraq -- noting that McCotter is an executive for a company operating a private prison in New Mexico that the Justice Department criticized last year for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates.

If Ashcroft and the Justice Department were responsible for McCotter's selection, why isn't Schumer calling for an independent investigation by persons outside DOJ?

Schumer wants to know how someone with McCotter's "checkered record" was appointed to the team Ashcroft dispatched to Iraq to help rebuild its judicial system. "There are many questions begging for answers," Schumer said last week. "Mr. McCotter 's selection also raises serious questions about the role that was played by civilian advisers in setting prison policies, designing training programs for prison guards and directly influencing the environment in which the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib took place."

The Herald (UK) is reporting that President Bush and British PM Tony Blair have been accelerating exit plans from Iraq:

The prime minister's spokesman, insisting that Mr Blair was not diverted by speculation over his future but was concentrating on getting the job done, denied the new strategy was a panic measure to silence the anti-war critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

He said: "They have been working on a joint strategy for the last few weeks and it has speeded up in the last few days. It is a recognition that people need to see we have a grip, that we are not there for ever amen, politically or militarily. "Neither is this a case of cutting and running, but showing we have a strategy of achieving what we said we wanted to achieve: the transfer of authority to an Iraqi government and responsibility to an Iraqi security system."

This Newsweek web exclusive has very powerful comments about the Iraq prison scandal and then more about the impulses that drive all of us, for good or bad, including those that have driven President Bush. Here's some quotes:

NEWSWEEK: What are the politics of denial?
Michael Milburn: We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies like support for the death penalty, opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force. We used a notion of therapy as a general indicator of denial or lack of denial. Well, the extent to which emotion connected to childhood punishment was driving their political attitudes, when they had an opportunity to sort of reflect on that and [have a] short-term catharsis experience, that sort of energy disappears.

What we have found, really broadly, is the higher level of punitiveness among political conservatives is really strongly associated with experiences, generally, of harsh punishment from childhood. It’s not just going to be that they were spanked; there’s a whole family climate, and punishment is just going to be one of those indicators of that. We have a whole chapter on the religious right. In our research we also found that when we gave people the statement “the amount of physical and sexual abuse in this country is greatly exaggerated by the mass media,” conservatives were significantly more likely to agree with that.

As to President Bush's formative experiences:

What does Bush’s upbringing and conservativism tell you about the way he sees the world?
Bush is really fascinating. There was a televised interview with Barbara Bush during the [2000] campaign. She was talking about her son and relating this one incident where he had come home drunk and his father was walking out to talk to him. W was saying, “OK Dad, right now, let’s do it.” Clearly there’s a tremendous amount of anger there. Not that this explains everything that’s going on, but it’s clearly, to me, a factor in his I’m-gonna-get-the-guy-who-threatened-my-dad-but-I’m-also-going-to-show-my-dad-that- I-can-do-stuff-that-he-couldn’t-do [attitude].

The Los Angeles Times has conducted an investigation into the deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Times has identified at least 18 cases of deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2002 from apparent mistreatment or shootings during prison unrest and other incidents. At least 14 occurred in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. The CIA has been connected by investigators, witnesses or other sources to as many as five of the deaths.

Independent human rights groups insist that more have died than the military has disclosed. They say that the military has refused to release sufficient information and that the investigations so far have provided too little accountability. Apparently, only one low-ranking soldier has been tried and convicted for shooting an unarmed prisoner. He was demoted to private and discharged from the Army.

Where do the numbers come from?

by TChris

According to Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, the thirty year effort to build and fill U.S. prisons has been great for the rural areas where prisons are generally located, but not so good for urban areas that lose representation in the census when urban dwellers are counted in the rural prisons that house them.

[B]ecause the Census Bureau counts prison inmates as residents of the legislative districts in which they're incarcerated, the relocation of inmates -- who are not allowed to vote in 48 states -- skews both the distribution of government funds and the apportionment of legislative representation.

The distortion in representation caused by enumeration of prisoners tends to favor rural residents, whites, and Republicans, at the expense of urban residents, blacks, and Democrats. ... [T]he presence of disenfranchised blacks in rural prisons increases the representation of white, rural, Republican voters both in the House and in state legislatures.

Politicians shouldn't be given an incentive to incarcerate more people for the sake of boosting populations in particular political districts. Stinebrickner-Kauffman makes a strong argument that the Census Bureau should correct this problem by counting inmates as living in their "homes of record."

The New York Times reports that in her sworn statement to investigators, PFC Lynndie England said of the abuse heaped on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

Pfc. Lynndie England explained the mystery of why soldiers at Abu Ghraib took pictures of detainees masturbating and piled naked with plastic sandbags over their heads by saying, "We thought it looked funny so pictures were taken." Private England's statement, made May 5, narrates the graphic photographs now at the center of the prison abuse scandal in specific detail and a matter-of-fact tone, describing the abuse as routine and sometimes amusing, but almost never, to her mind, out of bounds. [our emphasis]

Remember this picture of her leading the prisoner by the leash? That was no momentary encounter.

She explains how she put a strap around a detainee's neck and forced him and others to run and crawl down a hallway for "approximately four to six hours;" how one soldier would regularly throw a Nerf football at detainees with bags over their heads "to scare them;" how one soldier would kick detainees and cause open wounds, then "would personally stitch detainees if the wound weren't too bad," according to a copy of her statement given to The New York Times. [our emphasis]

As to her conduct and that of her co-guards:

Asked if she ever physically abused a detainee, Private England said, "Yes, I stepped on some of them, push them or pull them, but nothing extreme." She described how Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II punched detainees, "and the normal stuff as far as lean on them or push them." "He also played some mind games with some of them with chemical lights," she added. "He would tell them to lift their legs and place the chemical light under their feet and tell them it was a knife. The chemical light would then be broken and spilled on the ground, the detainee would then be forced to crawl through it and then placed in a dark cell, this would freak out the detainee because they would glow."

More about the guards' amusement:

Open thread: It's Sunday. Enough of us, let's hear from you. Can Bush survive the prison and torture scandals? Will Rumsfeld go first? Will Kerry figure out how to take the ball and run with it? If Bush is down in the polls, why isn't Kerry up?

[Comments now closed, over 100 of them, thanks to all for your thoughts.]

Update: Pentagon denies that Rumsfeld or other officials approved operations that led to the interrogation methods used on Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, the Defense Department said.

Update: The Iraqi detainees released Friday from the Abu Ghraib prison are urging the issuance of an international arrest warrant for U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his trial over their abuse.

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Original Post:

Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, who wrote this ground-breaking article on the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, does it again with his new article on a secret program approved by the Pentagon that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

[link via Atrios]

Update: Here's a Reuters article discussing the New Yorker article. And Memeorandum has a compilation of blog coverage on it.

Update: The Hersh article is the story of the day--Associated Press; CNN; over 1400 articles on Google already.

Seriously Though recaps 12 inconsistences in the Nicholas Berg decapitation video which we began chronicling here. One of our readers writes in another one:

I have been reading the inconsistenicies with the video and I have yet to come across one that relates to the man with the white hood. Throughout the whole beheading the man that is cutting Berg's throat has a black hood on and the one holding him down has the white hood on. Yet, right when the man completely severes the head, he grabs his hair and raises it in front of the camera and he has the knife in his right hand. THe funny thing is, he's wearing a white hood now. What happened to his black hood?

If you read no other articles today, you must read these: A third recently released British detainee at Guantanamo has accused the prison camp of having a brutal punishment squad, called "The Extreme Reaction Force" and says the abuse was videotaped. The Pengtagon acknowledges that there is such a force and that everything it does is videotaped. Sen. Patrick Leahy has said he will demand Rumsfeld produce the videos for Congress:

Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed. The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatised to speak until now, prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately. They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an institutionalised feature of America's war on terror.

Here's Mr. Dergoul's description of his treatment, as told to the Observer: