The Empire 40

Toen mijn vrouw en ik samen met onze zoon deze zomer vanuit Texas naar Californie reden, zagen we regelmatig ver weg in de hete woestijn van het zuidwesten zogeheten maximum security prisons liggen. Enkele kilometers daarvoor werden die al aangekondigd met verbodsborden. Men mocht geen lifters meenemen. Het waren surrealistisch aandoende complexen in die onherbergzame uitgestrektheid. Ze deden me denken aan de wereld van Big Brother.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com.
He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch. Hij schrijft:

'American Prison Planet.
The Bush administration as global jailor.
Today, the United States presides over a burgeoning empire - not only the "empire of bases" first described by Chalmers Johnson, but a far-flung new network of maximum security penitentiaries, detention centers, jail cells, cages, and razor wire-topped pens. From supermax-type isolation prisons in 40 of the 50 states to shadowy ghost jails at remote sites across the globe, this new network of detention facilities is quite unlike the gulags, concentration-camps, or prison nations of the past.
Even with a couple million prisoners under its control, the U.S. prison network lacks the infrastructure or manpower of the Soviet gulag or the orderly planning of the Nazi concentration-camp system. However, where it bests both, and breaks new incarceration ground, is in its planet-ranging scope, with sites scattered the world over - from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the Caribbean. Unlike colonial prison systems of the past, the new U.S. prison network seems to have floated almost free of surrounding colonies. Right now, it has only four major centers - the "homeland," Afghanistan, Iraq, and a postage-stamp-sized parcel of Cuba. As such, it already hovers at the edge of its own imperial existence, bringing to mind the unprecedented possibility of a prison planet. In a remarkably few years, the Bush administration has been able to construct a global detention system, already of near epic proportions, both on the fly and on the cheap.
Sizing Up a Prison Planet
Soon after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the U.S. began the process of creating what has been termed "an offshore archipelago of injustice." In addition to using "the Charleston Navy Brig" and locking up "one prisoner of war in Miami, Florida," according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Bush administration detained people from around the world in sweeps, imprisoned them without charges and kept them incommunicado at U.S. detention facilities at a CIA prison outside Kabul, Afghanistan (code-named the "Salt Pit"), at Bagram military airbase in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba, among other sites.'

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