Amusement

A new horrifying prisoner abuse scandal, this time revealed by a West Point officer and backed up by two sergeants.

Support for some of the allegations of abuse come from a sergeant of the 82nd Airborne who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch quotes him as saying that, “To ‘F____ a PUC’ means to beat him up. We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day. To ‘smoke’ someone is to put them in stress positions until they get muscle fatigue and pass out. That happened every day. Some days we would just get bored so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did that for amusement.

“On their day off people would show up all the time,” the sergeant continues in the HRW report. “Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat. He was the cook.”

Here’s what the pentagon had to say about it, by an officer who obviously studied at the Tom DeLay school of integrity:

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. John Skinner criticized the report as a predictable effort to try to “advance an agenda through the use of distortions and errors in fact.”

If this is true, I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about “Lord of the Flies” in New Orleans. It’s pretty clear that even our own highly disciplined military can lose their humanity without a whole lot of provocation. These weren’t dipshit national guard hicks either. This was the 82nd Airborn. No excuses.

As much as Katrina revealed the ugly underbelly of poverty and race in the country, 9/11 revealed the ugly underbelly of sadism and blind fury. This is a sick culture.

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