Getting to the Bottom Of It

[Amerpie]

ZNET - Lou Plummer

One Friday in my early twenties, I took off my camouflage fatigues for the last time. The following Monday I reported to the best job I could get. I was given a new uniform, a can of mace, a set of handcuffs and the keys to a cell block at a state prison in North Carolina.

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I also quickly learned that the management of the prison where I worked was intensely interested in keeping their jobs. They didn’t want to rehabilitate anyone. They didn’t want to heal anyone’s inner child. They didn’t want to cure anyone’s psychological disorders. They only wanted to continue to operate their little fiefdom as far from public scrutiny as possible. They weren’t even especially interested in getting promoted. Self-preservation was their goal.

It appears as though that model is not the one used at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The management of that institution is intensely interested in more than just self-preservation. They’ve been presented with a unique opportunity to take advantage of a hellish situation to advance themselves in ways they never dreamed possible. They have an almost unlimited supply of evildoers from whom information must be extracted so that they can be brought to justice. And, hey, if a few higher-ups can make their bones at the same time, that’s just icing on the cake.

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These soldiers, many of whom have been conditioned to accept racism and human degradation by working in U.S. prisons, are as much to blame for the outrages in Iraq as I was to blame for the conditions of the prison I worked in. All of us participated in a state-sanctioned evil. There is an attitude in our country that trains us to accept the fate of those who we are told are less deserving than ourselves. It isn’t the little people on the bottom who can be condemned for designing the system. It is the self-serving masterminds at the top who should bear that burden. President Bush says that he intends to get to the bottom of this situation. I suggest that he forgo that plan. He should get to the top of it instead.

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