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The United States as world's jailer in the 'war on terror': prisons in the US homeland are not very different from those run offshore.

Article Excerpt
The late Hunter S. Thompson in his last book Kingdom of Fear describes the post 9/11 United States as suffering from a kind of mass nervous breakdown. The paranoia best suited to the progress of neo-liberalism discovers the evil it has imputed to the 'other' and feels itself required, reluctantly but resolutely, to act out that which it has imputed. As Penny Green and Tony Ward point out in their book State Crime 'there is a lethal interplay between rational political calculation and the irrational or emotional process that such calculations may set in train'. The politics and economy of fear combine to produce a culture of fear.

Perspectives on the 'war on terror' fall into three broad camps. Those that think the world changed on 9/11; those that think it changed in the days, months and years that followed--when governments reacted in ways that radically undermined human rights--and those, like myself, who believe that the crime against humanity committed on that day provided the opportunity for an unmasking and broadening of trends already firmly established.

Some of the continuities between pre and post 9/11 violence and incarceration can be seen in the particular way that the 'war on terror' reflects, extends and reinforces the penal punitivness that has taken root at the heart of the criminal justice...

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