The volume of torture photos undermines the few-bad-apples explanation.

Evidence

Why the photos? I have yet to find anyone other than Mark Danner and former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski31 who believes that the nearly 2000 photos soldiers sent to their families and to each other were really destined for Iraqi prisoners’ homes or were meant to hang as a threat over detainees of their continual humiliation. This leaves the compelling question, as one of Canada’s national newspapers headlined, ‘Why record evil?’ Why so many of them? It is the excess of it all that troubles. When you are in the realm of such excess, it is harder to believe official accounts about a few bad apples. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 156

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the soldiers photograph the abuse in the first place? Worth chasing the Danner/Karpinski counter-theory and the visual-culture reading of prisoner photographing.
• XREF: connects to: Statistics about atrocities obscure the essence that extreme cases reveal. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 92