US soldiers at Abu Ghraib explicitly dehumanized Iraqi detainees as animals

Evidence

The crimes of Abu Ghraib show us how powerful the discourse of Muslim monsters is. One interrogator at Abu Ghraib commented, “We thought they [the Iraqis] were animals,” revealing that soldiers thought Muslims were something only humanlike. Some US soldiers likened Iraqis to animals, referring to them as “beasts.” There were “striking similarities between the lives of animals and the lives of prisoners captured on film at Abu Ghraib,” except the dogs used to torture the prisoners were treated better. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 744

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete documentary evidence of dehumanizing discourse operating directly in the torture site — soldiers literally classifying prisoners as animals, treated worse than the dogs.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the phrase ‘treated better than the dogs’ is a striking inversion — the torture dogs were the more humanized beings in the frame. What does that reversal reveal about the monster discourse?