The Stockades of Fort Dix - When Torture Was Practiced on U.S. Soil

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http://counterpunch.com/lisnoff07152008.html


Four years before I was brought to Fort Dix, New Jersey, shackled on a civilian bus that was filled with soldiers who had gone either AWOL or were wanted as deserters, a riot had taken place at the stockade on that base.* The riot was in response to brutality against prisoners in the brig. Thirty-eight men charged as rioters were starved, beaten, and caged. Tensions had been growing for months between the military brass and some of the MPs who guarded the soldiers in the brig. The population of the stockade had grown from over 200 to more than 700 as the Vietnam War became more and more unpopular among soldiers and the larger society. By the time the war was over in 1975 (direct U.S. military involvement ended in 1973), more than 500,000 men had either gone AWOL or deserted.

Originally named the Fort Dix Thirty-Eight, soldiers who were charged with rioting faced courts-martial, resulting in the sentencing of some men to three years in military prison. About the same time official representatives of the U.S. traveled to Vietnam to investigate the use of the infamous tiger cages used against the Vietnamese. In October 1969, just before the huge nationwide antiwar rally on October 15, thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of Wrightstown, New Jersey where Fort Dix is located in support of the antiwar soldiers.

All of the detainees who exited the bus I traveled on were placed in several two-story white clapboard World War II-era barracks. The stockade was located just beyond these barracks, now a cinder-block building surrounded with barbed wire, replacing the clapboard buildings where prisoners had been housed when the 1969 riot took place.

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When cases of torture were reported at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, opened in 2002 to house over 700 prisoners from the war in Afghanistan, I was not surprised. When detainees there were originally denied Constitutional rights and rights under the Geneva Conventions, I was not shocked, knowing just how far the government and military could go in inflicting punishment at bases in the U.S. and around the world. The military had inflicted abuse on its own soldiers during the Vietnam War, targeting those who did not fit the mold of military discipline.

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The U.S. is supposed to be a beacon of democracy to the world. I was naïve enough to believe this ideal during the Vietnam War, and thought that the lessons of that war would humanize the society. Instead, the government has sought to extend its neo-liberal economic agenda around the globe and to project raw military power in preemptive wars. It has been a long, long time since the nation actually has had to defend itself against an enemy. With the outbreak of World War II, the nation had to act. Following the Cold War, intelligence agencies and the military were not able to stop the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Instead they launched a war against the people of Afghanistan, stole rights from U.S. citizens in the name of security, and launched a war against Iraq, leaving that nation in ruins.
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america, a country that tortures