Officials minimized atrocity by comparing it to worse atrocities.

Evidence

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, 2342

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my reading on moral panics and the rhetoric of comparison — relative wrongness as a deflection, plausible in my scaffold on condemnation and scandal. — connects to: In-group glorifiers linguistically minimize accounts of their own side’s atrocities in written summaries. — Emanuele Castano, On the Perils of Glorifying the…, 55; High glorifiers minimize and deflect their own group’s atrocities. — Bernhard Leidner et al., Ingroup Glorification, Moral…, 26