Despite all the focus on Guantánamo, are a great many of America’s domestic prisons also beyond the rule of law?
TomDispatch"It so happens," writes Chase Madar in his recent TomDispatch piece, that, like the US’s military prison at Guantánamo Bay, "a great many of America’s unsung domestic prisons also routinely abuse inmates, are unable or unwilling to prevent inmate rape, employ long-term, sustained solitary confinement (which gives waterboarding a run for its money) and in actual practice are often beyond the rule of law."
In this video, Madar, a civil rights lawyer and frequent contributor to The Nation, The London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch and The American Conservative argues that Guantánamo’s lawlessness is not the exception, but rather the rule, when it comes to the American criminal justice and penal systems.
TomDispatchTom Engelhardt launched TomDispatch in November 2001 as an e-mail publication offering commentary and collected articles from the world press. In December 2002, it gained its name, became a project of The Nation Institute, and went online as "a regular antidote to the mainstream media." The site now features Tom Engelhardt's regular commentaries and the original work of authors ranging from Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Mike Davis to Chalmers Johnson, Michael Klare, Adam Hochschild, Robert Lipsyte and Elizabeth de la Vega. Nick Turse, who also writes for the site, is associate editor and research director. TomDispatch is intended to introduce readers to voices and perspectives from elsewhere (even when the elsewhere is here). Its mission is to connect some of the global dots regularly left unconnected by the mainstream media and to offer a clearer sense of how this imperial globe of ours actually works.