Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Quick Take

I see that Spencer Ackerman has a big story up at the Guardian about a prison in Chicago that he describes as using many of the same tactics that were employed by the "war on terror."

While I applaud this kind of expose' about our criminal justice system, his inference that this kind of thing is happening because these practices were somehow invented by the war on terror is completely ahistorical.

I remember that there were people who, when the topic of the day was the treatment of Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, tried to point out that this was not a singular occurrence - that it happened in U.S. prisons all the time.

This has been a consistent issue with our current crop of young poutrage reporters. I'm not sure why they need to pretend like what they uncover is something new rather than the continuation of a historical pattern.

1 comment:

  1. "This has been a consistent issue with our current crop of young poutrage reporters. I'm not sure why they need to pretend like what they uncover is something new rather than the continuation of a historical pattern."

    Easy. If you can convince people you discovered it, it means you're hot stuff, and not some schlub trying to get people to pay attention to something they've decided to ignore.

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