Abu Ghraib torture was framed as individual aberration rather than institutional culture

Evidence

The humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners by US and British military and contracted personnel that came to public attention in May 2004 were no doubt made thinkable by the broad ethnocultural characterization of Islamic perversity, aggression, and untrustworthiness long circulated but flagrantly reignited in the wake of 9/11. And yet the prisoner abuse was restricted by the public relations machine of the Bush administration and American military brass, as well as Tony Blair in the British case, to a very small number of soldiers “failing to follow proper procedures.” Reduced to the responsibility of a few bad apples, “the sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses” throughout virtually all American-administered Iraqi prisons, as a US army report put it in December 2003 (not unlike maximum security prisons across the US more broadly), could be dismissed as the racial depravity of a few rather than the institutionalized product of a state-licensed national culture responding to (self-promoted) threat. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 264

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘few bad apples’ narrative is a generic mechanism states use to deflect institutionalized — especially racialized — violence, across Abu Ghraib, policing, and prisons.
• XREF: connects to: The Arab Mind’s homogenizing caricature was instrumentalized to design US torture. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 206