Administration officials used comparative and evidential dodges to minimize wartime harms

Evidence

Drawing on historical contrast, Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged the inevitability of civilian casualties but added, “We can take comfort in the knowledge that this war has seen fewer tragic losses of civilian life than perhaps any war in modern history” (Shanker, 2002). General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, downplayed reports of civilian casualties in Afghanistan on the grounds that they were impossible to estimate reliably: “And so all of us have opted not to do that” (Lehrer, 2002). … “We don’t do body counts” (Broder, 2003). In the public view, precision-guided weapons spared the innocent. Rumsfeld also minimized the physical abuse and humiliation in Abu Ghraib prison by contrasting the abuses with beheadings: “Does it rank up there with chopping off someone’s head off on television? It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Was it done as a matter of policy? No” The administration also enlisted exonerative comparison to fend off criticism of its failure to follow up on specific warnings that al Qaeda was planning a major terrorist attack on U. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2340

Categorization

• XREF: Instances of the rhetorical normalization of state violence the vault tracks under Islamophobic-policy-serving rationalization; connects to Cooper’s social-conservatism claims.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2340