Abu Ghraib Scandal Research Articles

On Thinking and Not Being Able to Think: Reflections on Viewing the Abu Ghraib Photos

Using experiences from childhood, from encounters with contemporary art, from clinical experience, and, most elaborately, from an initial viewing of the Abu Ghraib photos, the author argues that the interpretability of experience depends upon its being legible. This legibility, in turn, depends upon the interpreter maintaining contact with his/her own capacities for thought, and, more fundamentally, with the vitally necessary community of others with whom he/she shares those capacities.

The Politics of Pain and the End of Empire

This article is a discussion of the role of feeling and emotion, and particularly the experience of pain, in contemporary global political events. In placing pain at the center of an analysis of a lived experience of global politics, the aim is to forge strategies to resist neoliberal imperialism and to create emotionally literate political communities. Drawing on the work of Elaine Scarry, Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon, the article situates the concept of emotions in a modern colonial landscape that is both racialized and gendered, complicated by neoliberalism as a subjectivity that contains the scope for emotions. As a case study, the article considers the emotions of viewing the deliberate infliction of pain through the circulation of the ‘Abu Ghraib photos’, particularly in the form of recent museum exhibitions in the USA.

None Dare Call It Torture: Indexing and the Limits of Press Independence in the Abu Ghraib Scandal

This paper considers the extent to which leading news organizations use independent documentation to build interpretations of events that challenge official framing. The data presented in this study show that despite available evidence and sources to support a counterframing of the Abu Ghraib prison story in terms of a policy of torture, the leading national news organizations did not produce a frame that strongly challenged the Bush administration’s claim that Abu Ghraib was an isolated case of appalling abuse perpetrated by low-level soldiers. The press struggled briefly, and in limited fashion with the question of whether events at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere reflected an administration policy of torture, but “abuse” was by far the predominant news frame. The case of Abu Ghraib offers a critical test of agreement and differences among theories of event-driven news, cascading activation, and indexing. Although all the 3 models were implicated in this case, the data, drawn from a content analysis of the Washington Post, CBS Evening News, and a sample of national newspapers, fit most closely with the predictions of the indexing model.

التغطية الاخبارية لفضيحة تعذيب المعتقلين في سجن ابي غريب

وفق ماتبين ضمن محاور الدراسة اتضح كثافة التغطية الاخبارية لفضيحة ابي غريب وقيام جنود امريكين بتعذيب السجناء العراقيين منذ الكشف عن الفضيحة في 29 نيسان 2004 حتى 30 ايار 2004 والمدة التي تكثفت فيها تغطية هذه الفضيحة ليس في جريدة الزمان فحسب بل بكل الجرائد والمجلات ووسائل الاعلام الاخرى محلياً ودولياً . وبحدود عينة البحث المأخوذة من جريدة الزمان كمادة للتحليل الموضوعي التي عبرت عن اهتمام صحفي متميز في ابراز الحدث وتفسيره ومتابعة جذوره ونتائجه وبيان مدى التناقض بين الدعوات والشعارات الامريكية والبريطانية على وجه الخصوص في احترام حقوق الانسان ونشر العدالة والمساواة والرفاه في العراق تحديداً وبين ما حدث على ارض الواقع من انتهاكات وتجاوزات للقوات الامريكية ومن تحالف معها ضد الانسان العراقي والتي تتعارض مع كل القوانين والتشريعات والمواثيق الدولية والتي تمنع انتهاك ادمية الانسان في اوقات السلم والحرب على حد سواء ولايمكن قبولها وتحت اي مبرر او مسوغ واتضح ايضاً اهمية التقارير الاخبارية في نشر جوهر الحدث واسبابه واعتماداً على معلومات واقعية جديدة باسلوب واضح وبسيط وشرح وتفسير شامل لمعظم جوانب الحدث وكل ما يتصل به من تطورات وافكار ومواقف ونتائج عاجلة ام اجلة اعتماداً على وثائقه.. ولمزيد من المتابعة الصادقة والموضوعية اعتمدت التقارير على وثائق دعمت المعلومات منذ بداية الحدث ،وابرزت التجاوزات الامريكية والخروج على القوانين الدولية وقرارات مجلس الامن والامم المتحدة في انتهاك حقوق الانسان وهو ما اثبتته (فئات التحليل) التي ابرزت التناقض الواضح بين الشعارات وبين السلوكيات والممارسات التي حصلنا عليها باعتمادنا خطوات علمية محددة برزت عند خضوع التقارير الاخبارية لجريدة الزمان لمراحل التحليل والتي اظهرت نتائج عديدة ركزت على ابراز استنكار وغضب الشعب العراقي ضد جرائم التعذيب في سجن ابي غريب مع الادعاء المتواصل عبر تصريحات المسؤولين الامريكين بمدى عدالة الادارة الامريكية في معاقبة الجنود الامريكين المسيئين للسجناء العراقيين وكذلك ابراز بشاعة التعذيب والاذلال الذي مارسه الجنود الامريكيون ضد السجناء واهتمام الصليب الاحمر واليونيسيف ومنظمة العفو الدولية بضرورة معاقبة مرتكبي جرائم التعذيب وكذلك كان التركيز واضحاً على ابراز ادعاء الرئيس الامريكي لاصراره على احلال الامن والسلام في العراق مع دعوات عراقية ودولية بتحميل دونالد رامسفيلد وزير الدفاع الامريكي مسؤولية جرائم التعذيب ضد السجناء العراقيين وقد ادت هذه الفضيحة الى تصاعد العداء الدولي والامريكي ضد واشنطن واتضح ايضاً تناقض الموقف البريطاني الذي برز في التحليل حيث التشكيك بصحة اساءة الجنود البريطانيين ضد المعتقلين العراقيين وبين حدوث ذلك فعلاً تبين من هذا الاتجاه.. اقتناع المسؤولين البريطانيين بحقيقة اساءة جنودهم للسجناء وانتهاكهم لحقوق الانسان العراقي وهو ما اتضح في التقارير الاخبارية بهذا الصدد مع الدعوات المتزايدة عراقياً وعربياً ودولياً الى ضرورة اغلاق سجن ابي غريب ومع كل هذه الاساءات فقد اعترف مرتكبوها بدور الاستخبارات العسكرية الامريكية في اصدار اوامر التعذيب وبشاعة التعذيب وسوء المعاملة واتضخ ايضاً وصف سجن ابي غريب بـ(باستيل العراق) ليس بسبب فضيحة تعذيب السجناء الحالية فحسب بل لسمعته السيئة لسنين طويلة مضت حيث كان ومايزال سجناً للاضطهاد والتعذيب والارهاب وفق ماحددته فئات التحليل واتضح ايضاً اتجاهاً فيه مبالغة وتضخيم في مدى تميز الخبرة الامريكية الفريدة في ادارة السجون والمعتقلات بعيداً عن الانتهاكات والتجاوزات مع ادعاء اخر يبرز حسن نية الادارة الامريكية والجيش الامريكي قيادة وجنوداً في محاربة الارهاب لحماية العراقيين انفسهم ..كما ابرز التحليل اتجاهاً اخيراً حيث حاول المسؤولون الامريكيون في العراق نفي ماورد في وسائل الاعلام ومايدور بين الشعب من وجود جنود وضباط يهود او اسرائيلين مارسوا التعذيب بحق السجناء العراقيين. ووفق ذلك كله تبين ان للصحافة دور مهم واساس في ابراز الاحداث واسباب وقوعها وكشف المعلومات والحقائق عنها واظهارها بشكل مفصل وواضح من حيث الاسباب والنتائج الى الرأي العام محلياً واقليمياً ودولياً فضلاً عن تقديمها الى المسؤولين في السلطة القائمة. لاتخاذ مايلزم من الاجراءات والممارسات التي تحفظ للانسان حقوقه وكرامته مع التركيز على تطبيق القوانين الصارمة ضد المسيئين حفظاً للامن والاستقرار والسلام بشكل عام.

"Torture Chambers and Rape Rooms": What Abu Ghraib Can Tell Us about the American Carceral System

There's still remnants of that regime that would like to take it back. . . . They could torture people and have rape rooms, and the world would turn their head from that and let it happen. But they can't do that anymore. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, BBC Interview, March 16, 2004 The Knowledge Which Does Not Know Itself In May 2004, George W. Bush addressed an audience at the United States Army War College, responding to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal with one of the most telling statements of his presidency: A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few [End Page 171] American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values. America will fund the construction of a modern, maximum security prison. When that prison is completed, detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then, with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison, as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning. (Bush 2004) Bush's message is impressively odd, not only in its brazen ideology, but also in its slavish dedication to the carceral, beginning with the first sentence that assumes there is nothing a new nation needs so much as new prisons. Less odd though, is Bush's assurance that the scandal is the result of a few abuses committed by a few dishonorable soldiers, not as the deliberate intelligence-gathering program for which it has recently been exposed (Dratel and Greenberg 2005). And even less odd is his attempt to separate the Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein from the Abu Ghraib under U.S. occupation. The abuses should not be confused with our core American values, he tells us, values that these incidents prove by their very violation. No matter the actions of a few renegade soldiers, we are to remember there is a fundamental difference between the terrorism of Saddam Hussein and the terrorism of the United States. The media response to the scandal was appropriately mixed. The most extreme pundits chose to validate torture as the prerogative of an inherently moral nation. Ethical morons like Alan Dershowitz argued that if we are to torture people openly we ought to provide some kind of court sanction, and Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter opined that we might be a little less fussy about outsourcing it to less scrupulous regimes (Žižek 2002, 102-3). Pat Buchanan led the audience of his MSNBC talk show in the public endorsement of an alleged al Qaeda agent's torture, and Fox News commentators concurred, adding he is "a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever" (qtd. in Žižek 2004a, 52-53). It was a spectacle that, as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek comments, "makes one nostalgic for the good old days of the colonial war in Algeria, when the torture practiced by the French Army was a dirty secret" (2004a, 53). Most just adopted Bush's distinction, preserving the sanctity of American values against the sadism evidenced at Abu Ghraib. The [End Page 172] eminently servile Christopher Hitchens, for example, chastised us for even daring to compare the two: Let me begin with a simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad. . . ." I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without...

The Court of Last Resort: Seeking Redress for Victims of Abu-Ghraib Torture Through the Alien Tort Claims Act

The Court of Last Resort: Seeking Redress for Victims of Abu-Ghraib Torture Through the Alien Tort Claims Act

The Revenante of Abu Ghraib

We must never dissociate the question of desire and of pleasure when we treat the political, and especially the democratic, the question of conscious or unconscious pleasure, from the calculation and the incalculable to which desire and pleasure give rise. Jacques Derrida, Rogues To begin with a question, as he often did, dare we attempt to synthesize even two or three of the most far-flung strands of Derrida's delicate, infinitely diverging web of ideas? Even if one can question the legitimacy of such a synthesis of the themes of globalization, gender and forgiveness in Derrida last works, the attempt allows us to see more clearly how his thought provides a guiding thread that might help us understand what returns as we refuse to forgive the unforgivable, and that in perhaps two registers, the personal and the political. I So, I will start with an antithesis: the pair that for a while became the heavily gendered icons of the war in Iraq, Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England. This pairing can be found in several media commentaries on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Bruce Kluger, in USA Today,, calls England the evil twin of Jessica Lynch, that other West Virginia soldier whose actions in Iraq were inflated by reporters in search of the perfect war story.2 The long-haired blond victim-become-hero because of her refusal to perpetuate Pentagon myths about her treatment at the hands of the Iraqis and subsequent "rescue" from them has her mirror image in the short-haired brunette "girl with the feral smile"1 become victim when her pregnancy and the relationship with an accused batterer,4 now married to someone else, that caused it were revealed. Contradictions within contradictions, starting with "American prison torture," or perhaps "woman soldier." Was what Lynndie England, her lover, and their cohorts did unforgivable? What Derrida says most clearly in his last work is that "there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable," and he says this precisely in the context of "crimes against humanity."5 This statement is a variation on his discussions of responsibility and the impossibility of relying on rules in moral conduct, for instance in Of the Name? but also in Rogues: "the responsibility of what remains to be decided or done (in actuality) cannot consist in following applying, or carrying out a norm or rule. Wherever I have at my disposal a determinable rule, I know what must be done, and as soon as such knowledge dictates the law, action follows knowledge as a calculable consequence: one knows what path to take, one no longer hesitates" (R 84, his emphasis). Both forgiveness and morality must be absolute, outside the law of reciprocity or the reciprocity of law, and therefore also literally irrational, without reason. Thus only the unforgivable can be truly forgiven. "I continue to believe that it is faith in the possibility of this impossible and, in truth, undecidable thing from the point of view of knowledge, science, and conscience that must govern all our decisions."7 What makes the unforgivable unforgivable? On this point Derrida moves in two directions. First, he suggests that nothing is unforgivable, that any conditions placed on forgiveness deprive it of its absolute quality. What must be forgiven is neither the person in isolation from the act nor the person as s/he is now in distinction from the person as s/he was at the time of the act." Rather, what must be forgiven is both the act and the person, "the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably" (OCF 39, his emphasis) This must be done without requiring contrition, regret, or even any recognition of wrongdoing on the part of the person responsible (which seems to be the case with Lynndie England and her lover). And it must be done, as Kant suggests, purely for its own sake, without conditions either that might link forgiveness to the concept "of God, of such a God, for example, who prescribed forgiving the other (person) in order to merit being forgiven in turn" (OCF 38). …

9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib: Time, death and empathy

The paper provides a reading of the repressed television footage of suicide on 9/11, the disappearance of the Iraqi body in media coverage of the Gulf War and its return in the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. The purpose of this article is twofold: to stage, or at least begin to imagine, an intersubjective relationship between subjects shaped by empathy, rather than only distance and indifference; and, to begin to move beyond the ocularcentrism that characterises a great deal of the analysis of these mediascapes. It is argued that because this ocularcentrism privileges a hierarchical subject/object relation at the expense of an intersubjective one, and because its concentration on vision excludes the other senses which influence how we experience, and relate to, the world, it is necessary to think beyond it. To this end, the image's agency, its synesthetic potential, is explored and a consideration is made of how the viewer might engage in a form of empathetic identification in the face of the duplicitous encounter with death which television structures in these scenes. The paper is written in dialogue with others who have asked: How might scenes of violence and death “move” us? It opens up questions around how this material simultaneously reveals and conceals death, and what affects these operations might yield. The writer suggests that these images have the potential to engender an affective economy of empathy.

9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib: Time, death and empathy

The paper provides a reading of the repressed television footage of suicide on 9/11, the disappearance of the Iraqi body in media coverage of the Gulf War and its return in the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. The purpose of this article is twofold: to stage, or at least begin to imagine, an intersubjective relationship between subjects shaped by empathy, rather than only distance and indifference; and, to begin to move beyond the ocularcentrism that characterises a great deal of the analysis of these mediascapes. It is argued that because this ocularcentrism privileges a hierarchical subject/object relation at the expense of an intersubjective one, and because its concentration on vision excludes the other senses which influence how we experience, and relate to, the world, it is necessary to think beyond it. To this end, the image's agency, its synesthetic potential, is explored and a consideration is made of how the viewer might engage in a form of empathetic identification in the face of the duplicitous encounter with death which television structures in these scenes. The paper is written in dialogue with others who have asked: How might scenes of violence and death “move” us? It opens up questions around how this material simultaneously reveals and conceals death, and what affects these operations might yield. The writer suggests that these images have the potential to engender an affective economy of empathy.

A Few Good Men: Psychoanalysis, Abu Ghraib and (the) American Right

This essay proffers a psychoanalytic reading of the events of Abu Ghraib as deeply symptomatic of changes in American foreign policy and political culture. The paper examines the Lacanian understanding of group formation developed by Slavoj Žižek in his work on politics and culture (in Part I), and then applies this understanding to the Abu Ghraib scandal (Part II). In Part III, implications of the analysis are elaborated, in terms of Žižek's contention that the contemporary “permissive society” engenders in subjects the desire for new forms of mastery or “moral clarity”.

Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib

In the topical commentary on the moral disgrace of Abu Ghraib, several commentators have noted a resemblance between the torture photos from Iraq and American lynching photos. These similarities have remained largely unexplored, however, including perhaps the most significant effects of the two sets of photos, which is that both came to function as sites of resistance against the very acts they represent. Between deeds that are very different in nature and motivation, and which took place at very different times and places, what might we learn from the similarities? What indeed constitutes these similarities? In this essay, I examine the usefulness of parallels between the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib and lynching photographs from the early decades of the twentieth century, and explore the political responses to the Abu Ghraib photos both through their public distribution and in contemporary artworks and civic displays.

BOOK REVIEWS

During 2004, terrorism's profile as a matter of international concern has continued to rise. The world has already witnessed the report of the US 9/11 Commission, the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, the Madrid bombings, the arrest in the UK of the radical Muslim cleric Abu-Hamza al Masri, the publication of works by former top anti-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke1 (Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror), the US Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of Guantanamo Bay prisoners (Rasul et al v Bush),2 the release of Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11 and an advocacy of torture warrants by Alan Dershowitz.3 It therefore seems particularly timely to review Philip Heymann's book which questions the very viability of a so-called 'war' on terrorism.