Abu Ghraib functioned as a law-exempt concentration camp, not a prison

Evidence

The parallels between the Somalia Affair and Abu Ghraib are startling. If Somalia was a place where law had to be abandoned in the interest of confronting lawlessness, however, Abu Ghraib was more formally constituted as a state of exception. As several scholars have pointed out, Abu Ghraib was not so much a prison as a concentration camp, where the rule of law simply did not apply. A ‘floating colony,’ in Amy Kaplan’s words, a prison of indeterminate status between domestic and international law, and above all, a camp where nothing had to be justified, Abu Ghraib could be little else than a place of terror. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 145

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters in this very book establishing the camp as a routine, legally authorized exclusion from political community.