As the news reports on the front page show, prison guards in the United States often force male prisoners to wear women’s underwear or strip naked in front of others, put black hoods on inmates, beat prisoners bloody and then make them crawl on their knees, or shower them with racist slurs. What’s the purpose of this physical abuse and humiliation? To break the prisoners and keep the state and federal institutions stable.

These practices are not an aberration, administered by a few “rogue” guards. They are the modus operandi in the U.S. prison system. The prison guards are not civil servants. Just like cops, they are trained to use their clubs and guns to keep the prisoners under control.

Prisons under capitalism are not “correctional institutions.” They are not for therapy. Everything imposed on those behind bars has to do with breaking them and making them complicit with the horrors of how prisons are run under capitalism. This applies not only to the humiliating and violent practices of the prison guards, but even to the so-called educational programs of “prison reformists”—be it alcoholic treatment, sex offender, or substance abuse programs. Prisons are a degrading reflection of the values and brutalities of declining bourgeois society.

Everything is organized to turn prisoners—who in their immense majority are workers and farmers—against one another, to reinforce the worst dog-eat-dog values of capitalist society, to differentiate the incarcerated. The fight of the working class is the opposite. Not to organize anything through the prisons, or try to “reform” them. But to defend any prisoner against any brutality or arbitrariness in order to allow prisoners to take as much space as they can to break down the barriers that separate them from the rest of society and from their rights.

Washington’s foreign policy is simply an extension of its domestic policy. Millions around the world are outraged at the systematic abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military police and intelligence officers. But it should be no surprise. A number of those already brought under charges got their training in U.S. jails. And they got their orders from others higher up in the military hierarchy to break the prisoners.

U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld claims the degradation imposed on Iraqi prisoners is “un-American.” Nothing can be further from the truth. These practices are as American as apple pie for their America—the America of the few billionaire families that rule the United States, the America they are responsible for running and that they should be ashamed of.

But there is another America. That of the workers and farmers who have irreconcilable class interests with the capitalist rulers. Working people in the United States are not responsible for Washington’s brutalization of our brothers and sisters in Iraqi or U.S. prisons.

Democratic Party politicians are crying wolf by demanding Rumsfeld’s resignation—or his replacement with liberal Republican Colin Powell, who led the U.S. army in its “turkey shoot” of tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqis at the end of Washington’s war against Iraq in 1991.

Abuse of prisoners during times of war, however, has been an entirely bipartisan policy. It has been a feature of all imperialist wars—from the two world wars to Korea and Vietnam. The Democratic Party ran the White House during most of these wars. Liberals were secretaries of defense or chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff under Harry Truman, when Korean prisoners of war were treated like “oriental cattle”; under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, when the U.S. military locked Vietnamese prisoners in the “tiger cages”; and under Clinton when “extraordinary renditions”—that is, sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured in order to “confess”—became commonplace after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

This has also been the hallmark of those imperialist powers that criticize the Bush administration and cry “United Nations” to advance their own predatory interests against those of the U.S. empire. Just ask the Algerian people about the conduct of the French army, for example.

The U.S. rulers are running up against the growing view, in bourgeois public opinion worldwide, that torture is unsupportable. The exposure of the unconscionable conditions and brutality facing hundreds of prisoners at the U.S. military garrison at Guantánamo—and formal protests from countries whose citizens are incarcerated there—paved the way for the revulsion surrounding the revelations of systematic abuse in Iraq.

No new secretary of defense, or Democrat in the White House, will bring a halt to the torture of Iraqi prisoners. The only way to fight for ending the abuse is to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and other occupying troops from Iraq. We should raise the same demand for U.S., NATO, and UN troops in Afghanistan, Korea, the Balkans, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Bring them home now!
 
 
Related articles:
Systematic abuse in Iraq mirrors prisons in U.S.
Systematic abuse in Iraq mirrors prisons in U.S.
U.S. prison construction booms, abuse rampant  
 
 
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