From Texas to Abu Ghraib: The Bush Legacy of Prisoner Abuse

[Catt03]

An American President's legacy.


From Texas to Abu Ghraib: The Bush Legacy of Prisoner Abuse

by Heather Wokusch

While administration officials express shock and outrage over allegations of the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by US forces, a deeper look into Bushs stateside prison-system record shows disturbing similarities.

Despite Tagubas report detailing US sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses of Iraqi detainees, the President declared, We acted, and there are no longer mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms in Iraq.

In George Bushs America, denial about inmate mistreatment runs similarly rampant. As Texas governor, Bush oversaw the executions of 152 prisoners and thus became the most-killing governor in the history of the United States. Ethnic minorities, many of whom did not have access to proper legal representation, comprised a large percentage of those Bush put to death, and in one particularly egregious example, Bush executed an immigrant who hadnt even seen a consular official from his own country (as is required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to which the US was a signatory). Bushs explanation: Texas did not sign the Vienna Convention, so why should we be subject to it?

More
http://www.bushwatch.net/heather.htm

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Heather Wokusch is a free-lance writer

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Also in re Bush/Texas/prisons in a Reuters article 5/14/04 the following:

Some excerptsn from the Reuters article:
"President Bush has said he was disgusted by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Yet, there were many cases of abuse in Texas when he served as governor from 1995 to 2000.

For example, in September 1996, guards at the Brazoria County jail in Texas staged a drug raid on inmates that was videotaped for training purposes.

The tape showed several inmates forced to strip and lie on the ground. A police dog attacked several prisoners; the tape clearly showed one being bitten on the leg. Guards prodded prisoners with stun guns and forced them to crawl along the ground. Then they dragged injured inmates face down back to their cells.

In a 1999 opinion, federal Judge William Wayne Justice wrote of the situation in Texas state prisons: "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."

Judy Greene of Justice Strategies, a New York City consultancy, said: "When I saw Bush's interview on Arab TV stations, I was thinking, had he ever stepped inside a Texas prison when he was governor?"

[MrBenchley]

1. This is something that should get widely read

Some of the reports of what went on in Texas prisons under Governor AWOL are not that far from what's been happening in Iraq...