The spine chilling pictures of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shocked the civilized world. Reported accounts say male and female Iraqi prisoners were subjected to rape and the worst kinds of torture. The prison guards would not only take pictures of the naked prisoners in humiliating positions or lay them naked on ice blocks, but they denied them food.
It’s clear to all and sundry that about 20,000 American contractors and soldiers and 11,000 British mercenaries were involved in these atrocities. The mistreatment of prisoners by Americans is not limited to Iraq. Rather it spreads from the Bagram air base in Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, with human beings held in cages crying for help. International human rights groups are voicing their deepest concern over these inhumane methods of incarceration.
The American private contractors managing Iraqi prisons ?hired at exorbitant salaries –are also involved in the same kind of business in the United States. Prisons at the federal, state and local level are under their control. The privatization of U.S. prisons is a big business, with contracts awarded through auctions.
Stories of excesses against inmates make it into the mainstream media every now and then. Many of these inmates are serving long-term jail sentences or are on death row. A majority of the prisoners are people of color. The U.S. prison system is such that many of those arrested for minor violations are behind the bars for much longer periods of time than middle-class inmates, who seldom face long-term or a death sentences.
The American prison industrial complex has become a profitable business with more than a million people held in these facilities. The profit trends in the American prison system indicate that the day is not far off when it will join the nation’s stock market and investors could buy shares. The by-product of this would be private broker firms across the nation whose job it would be to ensure that the American jails remain at full capacity.
After analyzing the incidents of prisoner abuse in U.S. and Iraqi jails, there are projections that the 45,000 prison population in occupied Iraq will increase to hundreds of thousands in the next 10 to 15 years. This growth would bring huge profits to the private contractors of these facilities.
The profits will grow despite the fact that the credibility of the American military has been seriously harmed by the shameful incidents in the Iraqi prisons; U.S. forces are accused of violating the Geneva Convention on prisoner rights and other relevant international laws.
But the 15,000 contractors are not alone in looting the wealth of occupied Iraq. Dozens of other big names such as Halliburton and DynCorp are also taking their share of the pie. Many of the companies operating in occupied Iraq for the supposed reconstruction of the country are fake and are being used to suck Iraqi wealth. These companies are using thousands of their private mercenaries to crush the Iraqi resistance. Wearing U.S. Army uniforms, these mercenaries are venting their anger against Iraqis prisoners by subjecting them to the worst atrocities. These mercenaries are also facilitating their parent companies, which hired them, to loot Iraqi resources with impunity.
White racists proudly declare the superiority of their race and hide their war crimes in Iraq by pointing to the oppression of the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussain. They are using Saddam as a smokescreen to hide their shameful acts in Iraq. That’s why President Bush can declare Donald Rumsfeld a “successful?defense secretary—although it was under Rumsfeld that these inhumane incidents occurred. In true democratic societies, senior officials resign after such shameful scandals; the Iraqi prison scandal did not move senior U.S. officials one bit. On the contrary, the American “minister of butchery?made a surprise visit to Iraq and thus gave a signal for the continuation of the murder of humanity.
In short, the network of American jails today has spread all across the world. Supervision of these jails is being handed over to former U.S. soldiers or the local oppressive rulers so as to safeguard U.S. expansionism and its economic interests. American corridors of power declared the pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners and the prison atrocities as “classified,?after shedding crocodile tears. The reason: to save the crocodiles who were involved in the war crimes.
