Welcome To "Progress"

clipped from www.michaeltotten.com “On the bus to the jail I didn’t have handcuffs,” he said. “I asked why. The guard said Look behind you. The first guy behind me got a 600 year sentence. The next guy got six hanging sentences. “The guards who ran Abu Ghraib sold hallucinogenic drugs to prisoners for money,” he told me. “They forced me to take them. You need protection in there. You find someone and give him drugs and cigarettes. You pay off the guards to just punch you in the face or move you to a different cell instead of kill you. I was freed 26 days after I arrived, on Saddam’s birthday before I finished the three months. I can’t live with this nightmare anymore.” He does not live with this nightmare anymore. Different nightmares now haunt decent and innocent people in his country. It seems somehow inadequate, tone-deaf, and perhaps even wrong to say Fallujah’s disgraceful warehouse for humans is progress. But it is.