Official accounts framed Abu Ghraib abuse as corrupt individuals, not policy

Evidence

The photographs did not lie’ is the line that introduces a book containing the official reports of what has come to be known as the ‘shocking prisoner abuse in Iraq.’ If the images of American men and women gleefully posing beside a pyramid of naked Iraqi men or giving the thumbs up beside hooded and naked prisoners did not lie, what truth did they tell? There has been remarkable consensus around the answer to this question in the media and in the official reports. As the Fay Inquiry summed up, the soldiers who abused detainees were ‘a small group of morally corrupt and unsupervised soldiers and civilians.’ Circumstances, however, pushed many of them to the brink: ‘The occupiers were overwhelmed.’ Inadequately trained, demoralized, fearful, and pressured ‘to obtain information that could help save American lives,’ they fell into torture and the sexual humiliation of prisoners. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 153

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘bad apples’ framing of Abu Ghraib connects to the book’s broader thesis about racialized eviction of Muslims from the legal order, and echoes how the state individualizes systemic violence in torture scandals generally.