« Let me Count the Ways | Main | He Can Shoot! He can Kill! »
October 21, 2004
"Chip" Gets Eight Years, Pending Appeal
Considering everyone else sentenced so far received a year or less, this is a bit of departure:
"Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, 38, an Army reservist from Buckingham, Va., was also given a reduction in rank, forfeiture of pay and a dishonorable discharge."
In the meantime, the Army -mirabile dictu- discovered that lack of training wasn't the issue here and, by implication, individual soldiers can and should make moral judgements:
Army Prosecutor Major Michael Holley told the court it was a simple case of right and wrong."He's an adult and capable of telling, as we learned, the difference between right and wrong. How much training do you need to learn that it's wrong to force a man to masturbate?" he said.
Now if we could only bring in those gazillion memos, orders, encouragements, assignments from the White House down into the picture, we could -almost- start thinking through the full implications of what we have become. Because even that would be a start. Maybe that's why everyone's running away from this issue; because it has something to do with this culture of cruelty of ours.
Posted by zeynep at October 21, 2004 12:13 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.underthesamesun.org/mt-tb.cgi/234
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference "Chip" Gets Eight Years, Pending Appeal:
» canadian pharmacy from canadian pharmacy
Take your time to visit some helpful info on quick weight loss crestor [Read More]
Tracked on July 3, 2005 06:55 PM
Comments
If Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick deserves 8 years, then Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld deserve about 1008 years each. And America's culture of cruelty, which is very-very real, deserves about a million and 8 years!!! But, of course, prisons are absolutely a big part of this American culture of cruelty along with patriarchy, male-supremacy, racism, militarism, and capitalism to name just a few components of this culture of cruelty.
Sincerely,
Old & In The Way
Posted by: Phil Cicchi at October 22, 2004 04:28 PM
Yes, I know the culture of cruelty is very, very real. And I know that I, being a white male American citizen, would definitely qualify as being a part of it, a perpetuator of it, because of my partaking in the capitalistic processes that are so easy to do today - shopping, paying taxes, hell, even eating the processed foods we eat. Every waking minute of our lives just spent, well, living in this damn country, means someone else has to suffer.
So yeah, I, as a white male American citizen, deserve an eternity in prison. Hell, not even prison. Torture. If an Iraqi were to come up to me and put a gun to my head and pull the trigger, he'd be justified in doing so. If he revived me a thousand times over and did it each time I came back to life, he'd be justified. Maybe I'd be of better use to the world if I just took that kitchen knife I have lying in my dorm right now and painfully slash my wrists with it. But then that wouldn't be punishment enough, would it?
I'm sorry if that last sentence was offensive, but I'm not trying to knock Iraqis. I envy them...they have a clear enemy to fight. I envy them because the enemy is not them. The enemy is me and the culture I represent with my mere being alive. But I digress, I'm trying to make a point here. That point is that this kind of thinking would be more likely to create depressed people who wouldn't do anything to fight this system of injustice that runs our country and our world. Instead of fighting for it, the very people who need to fight it - people like me - would be wallowing in their own living spaces, in despair about how they're singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of the rest of humanity, and how they deserve to burn in Hell for it. That's not productive. What WOULD be productive is instructing us what we can DO about it. Sure, maybe people like me aren't ready to ready to drop their televisions, their video games, their computers, their hamburgers, etc. (No offense, but considering how you write this weblog, you obviously aren't willing to drop the material goods computers have to offer either.) In the meantime, though, there has to be SOMETHING we can do to earn the right to live and feel better about ourselves. Cops arrest drug addicts to force them to quit the drug cold turkey, and it almost never works that way; in fact, it's a system of oppression all its own, being part of the vast Drug War being waged on our personal freedom. It's the same with all of us ordinary American citizens. Thrusting guilt trips upon guilt trips upon us won't suddenly make us drop all we have in the name of what's just. There has to be something we can do as an intermediary. Not all of us are strong enough to resist the American Empire from the inside, but there has to be some small way we can contribute, and constantly being told that we deserve to suffer the same fate as those Iraqis in Abu Ghraib ten fold isn't exactly a conducive factor in getting people like me to fight to make sure that NO ONE is treated that way ever again.
Every time I read something like this, that knife and/or those pills look friendlier...I hope that you agree that people like me would be better off alive than dead in order to contribute to the fight against the American Empire. I'm not asking you to apologize for telling the truth - yes, the truth hurts, and no one should apologize for telling the truth. But it should be kept in mind that we don't all have the strength and force of will you do to make the drastic changes in our lifestyle necessary...if we all did, there'd be no need for leaders. We need something that those fragile of mind - like me - can use to bolster our confidence that we can contribute to the smashing of this police state.
Posted by: Phil at October 25, 2004 11:57 PM