Mumia Abu-jamal's Radio Essays

In the last few years, we've all seen nothing but mass violations of virtually every international human rights treaty. Torture, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, violence against civilians, orders to ignore the Geneva Conventions .... The list goes on and on. How has the American government dealt with this state of affairs? It has virtually ignored it. There have been a handful of military prosecutions against relatively low level people, but there is a steel ceiling, above which the prosecutors dare not go. That's because the violations of international law go to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Writer Lila Rajiva argues, in her remarkable The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2005), that the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad shows something deep and ugly in the American state: "The Prometheans of today acknowledge no limits except of their own imagining, and at least for now the world that the