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Police homicide and abuse of citizens while in police custody has skyrocketed since the release in 2006 of the abuse photos from Abu Ghirab.
While this correlation is strictly anecdotal at this time, I have seen and observed the "piling on" phenomenon that occurs among humans when they are exposed to violence against designated "others". The need to belong and be "part of" a movement that is larger than one's self overrides the critical faculties of the mammalian brain under certain types of social stress and strife.
Plenty of research exists in the media violence literature to suggest that exposure to gratuituous violence has some, but very limited effects, on violent, aggressive human behavior. Forensic archaelogists studying the rates of violence from ancient times to the present day clearly show a pattern of decreasing, not increasing, violence from ancient to modern times.
Yet the research goes on and the nagging, intuitive questioning continues.
Violation of one's perceived self -- one's perceived identity either socially or individually -- represents trauma of a specific kind. Once trauma occurs, it seems that the human animal overrides its impulse to be kind or compassionate towards others, instead becoming violent, aggressive and predisposed to attack the targets identified through social and situational messaging.
All this being said, one must not overlook the kind of training that members of the military and the police endure that is designed to, "save lives." This training is by its very nature traumatic and forces the individual to re-identify themselves as a human being under certain situations. If no training, poor training or no memory exists to deal with a traumatic situation at hand, the human being will default into impulsive, aggressive and potentially lethal violence in order to save their "identity" from the obvious threat occuring in real time.
PTSD sufferers understand my point here, but most people do not suffer from any sort of identifiable symptoms of PTSD and those that do, particularly those who have been "trained" (i.e., "programmed," or "brainwashed") enter into a state of profound denial as to the nature of what it is they are doing and why they are doing it.
Police are trained to protect and serve the public, or so we have been told. The incidents in Greece and most recently in Oakland suggest that "service to the public" has been supplanted with a very different message: "control the suspect." In this new paradigm, the police become militarized and every citizen becomes a potential suspect.
Do not fool yourself into believing that a trained "controller" of the great unwashed masses can be reasoned with. Once the defenders of law and order begin to enter their "trance" they are no longer fully human. They will behave in the manner that best serves the force of which they are part of.
The force from which most police and SWAT team members come from is a paramilitary force trained to neutralize opposition to corporate control of all property and all assets. There is no longer any "public" commons which these forces can protect and serve: one of the unfortunate byproducts of massive state-induced bankruptcy is that the economy contracts into a feudal status. The police, the military and the paramilitary become as knights to their local king and his kingdom.
Should you seek to offend the king or his kingdom, you will find yourself at odds with one or more knights, some of whom do not come equipped with scruples. These knights have weapons of life or death at their ready and the power they possess over all of us has an enormous, falsely empowering impact over their identity.
Once those photos from Abu Ghirab were released and once it became known that Guantanamo was the source of the techniques in use, it was only a matter of time before the ooze that is man's inhumanity to man slithered out from behind its barricaded walls. Children were routinely tortured and tormented in Cuba and I have seen the subtle and not so subtle effects that working in such an environment cause.
Work with torturers and you will become at least sadistic, if not worse.
