High-level US policy stripped detainees of POW protections, enabling torture

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. In October 2002, the DOD Joint Task Force 170 at GTMO issued a memorandum specifying what “counter-resistance strategies” could be employed, a list that includes hooding detainees, 20-hour-long interrogations, forced nudity, and the use of “individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress.” Things quickly got out of hand, something anyone might have predicted. 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

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the prior belief in Muslim inhumanity translate at the policy drafting level into removal of Geneva protections as a first step, rather than as a later rationalization?