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So many expressions of merciless vindictiveness, so many desires for sheer punitive retribution, so much love of vengeance for vengeance's sake..."you reap what you sow"..."if you're going to dish it out you'd better be able to take it"..."karma is a bitch"..."he got what he payed for"..."no sympathy from me"..."he got exactly what he deserved"..."eye for an eye"...etc.
The question of "sympathy" is not over whether he deserved to be convicted and sent to prison in the first place. I don't think anyone (except maybe his deluded parents) disputes that. It concerns whether or not he was treated unfairly by receiving far harsher punishment than the other implicated grunts, and by the fact that none of his superiors or any CIA agents have faced criminal punishment for the abuses. I think just about everyone here would agree that many more people up and down the chain of command deserve to be locked up for what happened at Abu Ghraib (and Gitmo). The question of sympathy is also concerned with how he's being treated in prison and whether such arguably excessive, abusive treatment will make him even worse when he gets out than he was before! In such a context, reading such inhumane comments both sickens and angers me, especially considering that Salon purports to be a progressive website!
Don't you folks realize that attitudes such as yours are precisely why America has such an unjust and draconian criminal justice system and such a monstrously large and out of control prison-industrial complex in the first place? Don't you folks realize that such attitudes, taken to an extreme, are precisely why we even had to face the horror shows of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to begin with? If fewer people in this country held attitudes of callous indifference (let alone vengeful glee) when it comes to the brutalization, dehumanization, and degradation of prisoners, we might never have had to deal with the fallout of those appalling human rights travesties. Don't you folks realize that attitudes such as yours helped shift our prison system from rehabilitation to retribution, and have indirectly contributed to our unacceptably high recidivism rate? If prisoners are treated as little more than animals in cages, is there any wonder why so many of them return to lives of crime once they're released?
If it's true that the level of civilization of a given country can be judged by its prison system, then it's clear that long before Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the US fell well short of being truly civilized. But, hey! America's prisons aren't quite as wretched as those of Russia or China (even if ours are far more numerous), so that should count for something, right? What an achievement!
