United States creating prison planet: Randy Short

United States creating prison planet: Randy Short

Press TV has conducted an interview with Randy Short, a human rights activist, from Washington, to discuss the prison conditions in the United States.

What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How is this continuing to happen? On the one hand we know that the majority of the people have not had a trial, have not really been charged with anything and yet we’re talking about 12 years of being behind bars, one.

Two, we know about the whole torture allegations and nothing is being done.

Now third, they have been basically cleared for release from before but still technically are being held. How can the US get away with these violations, first of all, to its own Constitution besides the international community?

Short: They’ve always done it. If anything, this parallels what the former Soviet Union did with prisoners that it had. So, it shows a lack of professed democratic values ...

We can’t ever get away from the fact that the United States has about 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. When you think about within the last week you had two brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown that were in jail on death row for 30 years for crimes they didn’t commit. We’ve got Albert Woodfox who’s been in solitary confinement as one of the survivors of the Angola III, for 40 years. We have places like the Holmesburg prison in Pennsylvania where for decades they experimented and killed black men, primarily. This is what America is.

What you’re seeing is the African-Americanization of America’s international policy towards its enemies where now everybody is a black, and everybody’s going to get black treatment, and they keep people in jail here like they do overseas because they feel like it. This is the arrogance of what I call post-racial, Anglo-American apartheid on steroids, but not within America but outside. Now everyone’s being treated the same way. They’re making this a prison planet to obtain their geo-political and economic goals.

In a sense, these people are keeping Guantanamo open. By them remaining in prison, there justifies how the president didn’t keep his promise to close the place, [saying] ‘we have dangerous people, we can’t let them go, we have to keep them locked up’, the same way the United States now has privatized prisons and they give people money so they have to keep the jails full so you have to keep the money coming. It’s big business.

Press TV: Dr. Short, you just talked about the domestic situation basically, with the prisoners inside the United States, but I guess a broader question is why isn’t the international community then putting pressure on Washington because of these violations?

Short: I want to say I’m intrigued – I think people worship Anglo-Americans and the British somehow as this righteous force for good in the world in spite of the evidence to the contrary. People haven’t reached a point of beginning to see these Anglo-dominated societies, including Canada and Australia, as rogue, white settler colonies that don’t play by the rules.

I don’t know why people can’t see that. How many people do they need to jail or kill like Michael Brown? How many wars? How many Takfiri groups do they need to fund so people take a second look and think about what the Anglos have been doing the last four-, five-hundred years? They certainly haven’t loved their neighbors.

They’re modernistic bullies. They’re able to use modernity and high-tech weaponry to bully people.

In terms of their human rights and things that they profess, there’s not much of that, is there? –Honestly.

GMA/HMV