Torture at Abu Ghraib was coldly systematic rather than the work of sadistic individuals

Evidence

As Arendt noted of the Nazi concentration camps, brutality was not simply born of guards who were unusually sadistic or resentful of prisoners who had once been their social superiors. Instead, ‘the old spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or postponed indefinitely.’ Systematic destruction and systematic abandonment of surplus or unwanted populations is productive. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 146

Categorization

• XREF: Directly contradicts the official US framing that Abu Ghraib was ‘a few bad apples’; pairs with Arendt’s banality of evil literature.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of spontaneous bestiality into calculated destruction is a genuinely dense re-framing of how institutional violence operates—worth sitting with.