Belief in Muslim monstrosity authorized legal torture at Abu Ghraib

Evidence

The policies that led to Abu Ghraib’s house of horrors came from the highest authority, orchestrated by Americans who believed wholeheartedly in the inhumanity—the monstrosity—of Muslims, and who counted on an apathetic public, should the crimes ever be discovered. … According to a January 19, 2002, memo from the office of the Secretary of Defense, “Al Qaeda and Taliban individuals under the control of the Department of Defense are not entitled to prisoner of war status.” Prisoner of war status, part of the Third Hague Convention, was intended to ensure that prisoners of war not be tortured. The removal of such protection gave the green light to torture. … Once torture was sanctioned, the gruesome scene at Abu Ghraib unfolded—crimes that read like a script of a horror movie: anal rape with a phosphorus light, torture through the beating of sexual members, and other sadistic acts. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 746

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ‘moral panic’ machinery of the still-dominant narratives as in the reader’s own work on Islamophobia as a manufactured fear. — connects to: Anti-Muslim racism is not continuous from the Inquisition to Abu Ghraib — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 92
• QUESTION: The 2002 DOD ‘counter-resistance strategies’ memo is a concrete documentary artifact — worth chasing the original text to quote precisely.
• SEED: The line ‘crimes that read like a script of a horror movie’ bridges torture policy directly to horror genre aesthetics — an essay angle on state violence borrowing monster-movie conventions.