Abu Ghraib Prison Research Articles

Do the Photos Tell it All? Representing Torture in the Images from Abu Ghraib

In 2004, pictures of U.S. military personnel abusing detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison came to public attention, triggering a new debate on torture. This essay examines the shock potential of the photographs from Abu Ghraib as well as the representability of pain. It argues that the role of photography in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal is a complex and complicated one, oscillating between becoming complicit in the torture and exposing it.

Notes from Various Front Lines

Reflections on Ten Years of War Since 9/11. Silver Eye Center for Photography Pittsburgh September 13-December 10, 2011 HomeFrontLine: Reflections on Ten Years of War Since 9/11, co-cnrated by Ellen Flenrov and Leo Hsu, featured work by eleven photographers and photojournalists exploring the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The collection of images included in the exhibition did what good phonography does best: offer windows and mirrors, those portals and flashpoints that allow questions. As is her strength. Nina Berman made us examine ourselves and our home turf. Her photograph Boy and Girl at U.S. Marines Recruiting Event, Orchard Beach, The Bronx, New York, 2007 (2007) as well as her series Homeland (2003) force us to acknowledge the degree to which militarism permeates our non-combatant lives. Bcrman's image of youth simulating a terrorist attack is the new normal, and her image of a girl donning military gear over her bikini at a beachside Marine recruitment event generates curiosity more than a voyeuristic gaze, revealing much about the concessions we make in delineating the slippery concept of homeland. Freed: Faces of Guantanamo (2008), Alfonso Moral's portraits of men previously detained at Guantanamo Bay, reveals further evidence of the collective work of defending freedom, found in die stamp of accusation embedded in the facial lines of the now-freed detainees. Encountering these portraits provokes a search for truth: Did they really commit terrorist acts? Can I tell by looking at their feces? Photographed in Afghanistan in 2008, Moral's photographs generate a line of questioning that is often avoided: What is being done in our name? Like the infamous photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, these pictures while not providing the same kind of graphic shock contain the certain ugliness of a secret (torture, false witness, actual terrorism) that isn't really a secret. This exhibition's intent was to create a space in which to pause and to think about this decade of war in the aftermath of 9/11 and the enormous human, social, economic and political costs incurred. The exhibition's portraiture focused on the costs incurred by the living. Kevin Bubriski offers black-and-white psychological portraits of New Yorkers staring into the pit of Ground Zero in Pilgrimage: Looking at Ground Zero (2001), while Gabriela Bulisova's project Option of Last Resort: Iraqi Refugees in the United States (2010) shows us the suffering of Iraqi refugees now settled in the U.S., reminding us that more than two million people have fled Iraq. On the other hand, one might question the efficacy of projecting video of U.S. soldiers on patrol, as in Miehael Kamber's video Soldiers on Patrol in Iraq (2008). While access is certainly crucial to war photographers, and is a point Kamber seeks to make, as curators, as cultural commentators, as artists, we have lo ask ourselves about the gallery's ability to translate the fast pacing and context of war, as well as war's certain suspension of social and moral codes. Though Kamber's video is shot close to armed soldiers as they patrol Baghdad streets, can we expect cultural consumers lo meet these quick-and-dirty moving images with any real understanding of war action? Kambcr asks us to consider censorship (content), but. perhaps a more tempered view is to consider the context of this work. contrast to Kamber's video, Claim Beckett's series In Training (2006), lush 4x5 portraits of the recently enlisted. offers the stillness associated with the format, and it works. The late-adolescent soldiers evoke compassion on one hand, and self-consciousness of our steady, slow gaze on the other. None of the subjects address us and all possess a slightly miserable look. …

Some Dared Call It Torture: Cultural Resonance, Abu Ghraib, and a Selectively Echoing Press

This study draws upon research on “indexing” and “cascading activation” to explore U.S. political and news discourse surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Specifically, we systematically analyze White House, military, congressional, and news messages. In so doing, we incorporate scholarship on social identity theory to suggest why news media challenge certain White House frames but uncritically echo others. Our data demonstrate that White House frames were consistently challenged by Democrats in the opposing party, but that these competing congressional messages were largely absent in news coverage. These results challenge previous research on news coverage of Abu Ghraib. We discuss how these patterns align with and expand Entman's cascading activation model of press-state relations, and consider the implications for future scholarship.

'Music and lyrics' — dancing to his own tune

‘But can it be true?’, Max asked out loud to himself. It was September 1991 and we had just received at the Palais des Nations in Geneva the first personal testimony of an alleged victim of serious human rights violations committed by the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Dr Hussein Shahristani, Iraq’s leading nuclear physicist (and now long-serving Minister of Oil — the only person in the country broadly trusted for that job), had shown us his hand and explained Sotto voce how an automatic drill had been used to penetrate it in an effort by Saddam’s henchmen to persuade Dr Shahristani to build a nuclear bomb. For his refusal he endured ten years of solitary confinement and various tortures in the infamous Abu Ghraib Prison. Max heard the calmly conveyed words from the dignified gentleman before him, but he hesitated to believe that such torture over such a length of time could be so suffered or matter-of-factly recounted. For all his careful intellect, Max was disposed to follow more his feelings about such testimony from this witness whom he had never previously met nor heard of. With caution, we compiled a broad cross-section of allegations of human rights violations — of all kinds affecting anyone under Iraqi control or jurisdiction — and in autumn 1991 submitted them to the Government of Iraq for its comment. Many allegations had been corroborated by different forms of evidence — documentary and testimonial. Some had been captured on film, many were inescapably true insofar as they were expressed in official decrees published in the Iraqi Official Gazette ... and many were repeated. It appeared quite evident that Saddam’s regime was responsible for gross, widespread and systematic violations of human rights. Still, Max took care that nothing was submitted for which we had doubt about its veracity; better to err on the side of caution. Somewhat remarkably, the Government of Iraq responded by denying any and all allegations – accusing us of submitting lies and fabrications. Later, they admitted facts, but invoked various spurious excuses, including repeatedly blaming ‘the sanctions’.

Standard Operating Procedure, 'the mystery of photography' and the politics of pity

This essay focuses on Errol Morris's documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008). I consider the film's significance as an investigation of the abuse of Iraqi inmates by US personnel at Abu Ghraib prison, and as an examination of the uses and limitations of photography as visible evidence. Drawing on Luc Boltanski's work on the politics of pity, I argue that the film's achievements are ultimately limited, not only by its particular organization of the ‘topics’ of aesthetics, sentiment and denunciation, but also by the fact that, in listening to and (partially) reframing the torturers, it leaves their victims in continuing silence.

Torture and the Replication of Religious Iconography at the Abu Ghraib Prison: A Visual Semiotic Experiment

Abstract: Mixing self-selected images of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal with religious imagery, this paper gives a commentary on the offences committed there. The author notes that this paper is not intended to be an in-depth historical or sociological treatise explaining the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Rather, this paper is a visual semiotic experiment crafted primarily to combat a moral blindness that allows individuals to ignore, or even to justify, such degradation and brutality. By appropriating and re-mixing these images, this work seeks to transform them into messages that call out and question religious, cultural, and political justifications for the use of torture.

“Instants of Truth”

Lacking the truth, [we] will however find instants of truth, and those instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror. --Hannah Arendt (1) Susan Sontag believed that capitalist societies require images in order to infiltrate the culture of everyday life, legitimate official power, and anaesthetize their subjects through visual spectacles. (2) Such images also enable the circulation of information along with militaristic modes of surveillance and control. Sontag argued in her later work that war and photography have become inseparable, and as a result, representations of violence no longer compel occasions for self and social critique. Rather, shocking images increasingly emerge as a mode of entertainment--advancing the machinery of consumption and undermining democratic relations and social formations. She was particularly concerned about what I will call an of depravity--an that traffics in images of human suffering that arc subordinated to the formal properties of beauty, design, and taste--thus serving to bleach out a moral response to what is shown. (3) For Sontag and many other critical theorists, the of depravity reveals itself when it takes as its object the misery of others, murderous displays of torture, mutilated bodies, and intense suffering while simultaneously erasing the names, histories, and voices of the victims depicted. In a meditation on the extermination of bodies and the environment from Auschwitz to Chernobyl, Paul Virilio refers to this depraved form of art as an aesthetics of disappearance that would come to characterize the whole fin-de-siecle of the twentieth century. (4) An example of this mode of was on full display in the mainstream media's coverage of the photographs depicting the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. As Mark Reinhardt points out, the dominant media had no doubts about showing the faces of the victims--thus violating their dignity--but expressed widespread indignation over reproducing the naked bodies of the victims, claiming that it would demonstrate bad taste. (5) In this instance, concerns of beauty and etiquette displace subject matter while sheltering the viewer from any sense of complicity in such crimes. As I will argue below, the release of the Kill Team photos gestures to an even darker side of the of depravity. In this particular instance, images of death emerge in a historical conjuncture in which desire, aggression, and pleasure do more than erase the subject of suffering or potentially pose for the viewer what Roger Simon has called a difficult encounter. (6) On the contrary, the kill team photos register a new kind of subject situated within a market-driven society that is less about satisfying desires than endlessly producing them, though in this case the desires and the pleasures they construct are linked to the death drive, and to modes of aggression in which pleasure finds its object in the most obscene forms of violence, i.e., the taking of the lives of others deemed as expendable, excess, and disposable. I want to build on the relationship between and violence by drawing upon a notion of the aesthetic that merges spectacles of violence and brutality into forms of collective pleasure--constituting an important and new symbiosis between visual pleasure, violence, and suffering. My emphasis here is not on the sadistic impulse and its relationship to as a matter of individual pathology, but on what I call the depravity of aesthetics, an aesthetic that registers a larger economy of pleasure across the broader culture. This differs from the of depravity addressed by Sontag, Walter Benjamin, Virilio, and others focused on suffering through the formal qualities of beauty and design--registering the consumption of images of human pain as a matter of personal pleasure and taste rather than part of a broader sociopolitical discourse. …

Imag(in)ing Abu Ghraib

... there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding--at a distance, through the medium of photography--other people's pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. --Susan Sontag (1) In the spring of 2004, several American news outlets published photographs taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, photographs showing Iraqi detainees subjected to horrific actions at the hands of their captors. For most viewers of the Abu Ghraib photographs, there was no doubt the actions depicted qualified as atrocities--well beyond the bounds of what might be considered acceptable conduct in time of However, the unsettling nature of the images stemmed not just from the barbaric practices depicted, but also from their very existence as images. In his 2010 memoir The Ticking is the Bomb, Nick Flynn recounts a conversation in which the horror of the photographs as photographs is revealed: On the day the photographs appear, a veteran of the Korean War is interviewed on the radio in a coffee shop in Tennessee. By now the photographs are in every newspaper in the world and it sounds as if he is thumbing through them as he speaks. You know, he begins slowly, searching for the words--stuff like this happens in every war. It's hard to tell if he's disgusted or merely baffled. He pauses, then his voice gets slightly more indignant--but don't take pictures. (2) The you referred to by the veteran is, of course, the soldier himself or herself--journalists might have license to photograph such atrocities as part of the historical record of war, but those committing the acts should not themselves record those actions. That the taboo role of soldier-photographer was assumed in Abu Ghraib is sometimes made apparent by what is revealed at the edges of the images. For example, the iconic photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his arms includes at the right edge of the frame a soldier looking at the screen of his digital camera presumably doing what most of us do after taking a digital snapshot: checking to see whether it is a keeper or whether to trash it and reshoot. This mundane act reiterates the ultimate power of captor over captive: not only does the soldier have the right and power to force the physical torture of his subject, he also controls the visual rendering of the act, framing and fixing the moment according to his aesthetic pleasure. Tims, the Abu Ghraib photographs occupy a space at once related to and distanced from that held by photographs of horrors such as the Nazi concentration camps, napalmed Vietnamese children, and massacred Rwandan civilians. The last images rely for their effect on their privileged role as objectively capturing the truth of war through the eyes of a third party. The Abu Ghraib photos equally record the truth of wartime actions but do so through the view of those engaged in the acts themselves. Between 2005 and 2008, artist Daniel Heyman traveled with American lawyers to Jordan and Turkey to meet former detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The attorneys were taking the detainees' depositions to be included in a series of civil cases filed in the United States on behalf of the Iraqi victims. As he listened to these men tell their stories, Heyman drew their portraits, combining text and image in media varying from drypoint to gouache. In many ways these portraits function as a counterpoint to the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. Unlike the photos, which foreground the degradation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners through shockingly graphic visual images, in Heyman's work the text is made to bear the burden of reproducing the horrific experiences of the detainees. …

Comfort, irony, and trivialization: The mediation of torture

This article examines the interrelationship of torture and comfort as a key feature of the United States project of American Empire, examining how the U.S. practice of torture is mediated in American culture, in particular through the distancing strategies of domestication, trivialization, kitschification, and irony. It uses as a framing concept Roger Silverstone’s notion of ‘proper distance’, in particular its formulation of the relationship of mediation to morality, to examine the mechanisms in American culture that enable a level of comfort with the practice of torture. Through an examination of the image icons of the Abu Ghraib prison and the representations of torture at Guantánamo Bay prison, including popular culture representations, trivializing rhetoric, artistic engagements, and kitsch souvenirs, this article analyzes the tensions of proximity and distance that mediate the U.S. practice of torture.

The Textual Mediation of Denial: Congress, Abu Ghraib, and the Construction of an Isolated Incident

The rhetorical techniques by which governments deny, justify, and qualify alleged instances of torture have been well documented. Sociologists, however, have neglected the social contexts in which officials confront allegations of torture, as well as officials' use of evidence to strengthen their own or weaken competing claims about torture. Relying on findings from a qualitative content analysis of seven Senate Armed Services Committee hearings held in 2004 on “detainee abuse” at Abu Ghraib prison, this article examines the processes by which hearing participants portrayed the violence there as an isolated incident. Building on James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium's (2003) “constructionist analytics,” I examine the textual mediation of claims-making in the hearings, focusing on the interplay between textual realities of detainee abuse and the interpretive uses to which hearing participants put these realities. I show that developments in the textual environment of the hearings, particularly the development of a textually mediated vantage on events that “really occurred” throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, provided hearing participants with rich interpretive materials to downplay and rationalize instances of abuse that occurred in places other than Abu Ghraib prison. These findings suggest that official denial is sustained by diverse claims-making activities, including the production of a textual reality of human rights violations. The findings also extend the purview of social problems theory to account for the role of texts in the construction of social problems.

Psychologists and Detainee Interrogations: Key Decisions, Opportunities Lost, and Lessons Learned

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, U.S. psychologists faced hard choices about what roles, if any, were appropriate for psychologists in the detainee interrogations conducted in settings such as the Bagram Airbase, the Abu Ghraib Prison, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps. The American Psychological Association (APA) sparked intense controversy with its policies and public statements. This article reviews APA decisions, documents, and public statements in this area, in the context of major criticisms and responses to those criticisms. The review focuses on key issues: how the APA created and reported policies in the areas of ethics and national security; transparency; psychologists' professional identities; psychologists' qualifications; ethical-legal conflicts; policies opposing torture; interpretations of avoiding harm; and effective interrogations. It suggests lessons learned, missed opportunities, and questions in need of a fresh approach.

‘Emergent Structure’ in the Abu Ghraib Political Cartoons of Emad Hajjaj in a News Context, or, What do the Images of Abu Ghraib ‘Want from Us’?*

The Torture scandal of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was exposed in 2004 when 60 Minutes introduced the story by placing on its web site the photo of a hooded prisoner on a box. That particular image, chosen by many cartoonists and scholars as the iconic image to represent torture, is the subject of this study. I apply the theories of “conceptual blending” (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) to the Abu Ghraib cartoons of the hooded prisoner as well as to the cartoons that draw on that iconic image years later. By tracing the cognitive and visual strategies political cartoonist Emad Hajjaj used to transform that powerful icon into 24 cartoons between 2004-2010, I illustrate how the image continues to be blended into new “emergent structures” that are applied to other news events. I suggest that, over time, the Hajjaj cartoons changed from timely commentary on the mistreatment of prisoners, to icons that encourage “a devotional reading” (Mitchell, 2006) of related and unrelated news events. Those same images have also inspired political “culture jamming,” in which artists turned the iPod into iRaq, and posted mock iRaq posters, extending the life and reach of the image.

Social Identities and the Attribution of Blame

Abstract: Individuals develop causal stories about the world around them that explain events, behaviors, and conditions. These stories may attribute causes to controllable components, such as individual choice, or uncontrollable components, such as broader forces in the environment. We employ attribution theory to outline how identities may shape causal attributions about problems, with a particular focus on whom or what is blamed for problems. We argue that social identities, such as partisanship and veteran status, can predispose individuals take make certain causal attributions over others. We test several hypotheses using individual level data from national surveys to explain attributions of blame for alleged prisoner abuses in the war on terrorism, including prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. Our findings suggest that social identities predispose people to make certain attributions of blame, and some social identities interact with other individual characteristics to shape attributions. We suggest that attribution theory would be significantly enhanced by better incorporating the social identities of observers.

The ‘new home front’ and the war on terror: ethical and political reframing of national and international politics

This article uses the concept of the ‘new home front’ to address the ethical and political reframing of national and international politics in the ‘war on terror’. It examines the links between ethics and politics in the context of links between ‘home’ and the ‘front’. The first thing to make clear is that the ‘new home front’ in the war on terror has multiple dimensions to it. Just as it refers to links between ‘home’ (as in national or domestic) and the ‘front’ (as in the military spheres of action in Iraq and Afghanistan), it also refers literally to the home front, with terrorist attacks and continuing threats of them in the UK, importantly from home-grown as well as internationally networked terrorists. So there is a complex spatiality involved in the ethical contexts of policies and politics related to the war on terror that binds security issues at home to military action overseas in ways that are overt or not. I aim to unpack some of the less obvious dimensions of that complexity in three areas. All three relate to the problematic nature of assumed separations between domestic and foreign policy, between what is considered to be ‘out there’ (overseas, foreign) and what is ‘in here’ (home, domestic). The first area concerns the varied impacts of new media connections as part of everyday life. The new media (the internet and diverse mobile devices linked to it) have disrupted traditional national vertical (top-down) linkages between political agents, the mass media and the public through a myriad horizontal real-time online connections. This means that it is far harder for governments to control the ethical content of information distributed about war, as demonstrated, for example, by the dissemination of pictures of prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison. The second area of spatial complexity relates to the pervasiveness of security concerns as integrative of domestic and foreign influences, in contrast to the predominant traditional view of security threats as external. The significance of home-grown terrorism, and intelligence and policing efforts to detect, prevent and punish it, have led to new ethical dilemmas for liberal democracies. The winning of hearts and minds is as much about persuading citizens of the legitimacy of the security imperatives that limit their liberal freedoms—the very freedoms such imperatives are ultimately intended to protect—as it is about encouraging them to be vigilant and report on any suspicions they may have about potential threats. The third area of spatial complexity is probably the least overtly recognized in terms of the ethics and politics of the war on terror. It relates to everyday citizenship and multiculturalism and gender. Here the collective and individual arenas are touched on in ways that demonstrate some of the deeper politics of the war on terror, including identity politics. Multiculturalism has been substantially in the foreground of this war and a new reflexivity about liberalism within and beyond the UK. Women and gender relations have been central to ethical tensions in the war on terror. They have frequently featured in links between foreign and domestic policy, including in the contexts of multicultural politics and religious issues.

Abu Ghraib, the security apparatus, and the performativity of power

ABSTRACTThe critical discourse on U.S. military detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison has been dominated by Weberian‐style arguments (a bureaucracy gone wrong, insufficient or badly applied administrative rules, or individuals acting as cogs in a machine). We argue that Michel Foucault's “security apparatus” provides a more insightful model for understanding the Abu Ghraib phenomenon. According to this model, the prison becomes a nodal point in an information‐gathering nexus confronting unforeseen, emergent, and unclear events, a place where power is less disciplinary than improvisational, exercised through practical judgments about uncertain situations. The performance of such power at Abu Ghraib included the use of photography and acts that, we claim, resemble M. M. Bahktin's negative carnivalesque. [Abu Ghraib, security apparatus, improvisational power, photography, carnivalesque]

Beyond TraumaTorturous times

This essay investigates whether the ‘trauma paradigm’ that has emerged in cultural theory is adequate to examine one of the most urgent political questions of our time: the question of state-sanctioned torture in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The first part explores whether the delight in aporia and paradox of much trauma theory is at odds with more urgent political imperatives to represent and circulate images of atrocity in torturous times. The second part investigates a number of cultural representations of trauma that have emerged outside the modernist trauma aesthetic, in particular looking at how Gothic tropes have been used in television and cinema to offer representational modes to debate torture. The study concludes with a reading of the film Pan's Labyrinth as an instance of how fantasy, Gothic and overdetermined historical traces have converged to navigate experience in an era of torture.

Media Representations of Women and the “Iraq War”

This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.” Because the so-called war in Iraq is unlike others in that there is no front-line, U.S. women have been engaged in combat along with men. Women soldiers, not technically allowed on the front lines, continue to see action, to kill and to be killed. A shortage of military personnel leads to stretching the rules regarding women in ground combat forces. But, reportedly, the American public is no longer shocked at the idea of women dying in war; there is no more attention paid to fallen women than fallen men. Women’s participation in integrated units for the most part goes unnoticed. The women in these units adjust by using newer forms of birth control to make their periods less frequent or eliminate them altogether; and the military has disbursed a portable urination device that women soldiers call a “weenus” for long road-trips. They find ways of adapting their bodies to the male standards of war. Women are serving and dying, but conservatives think women should be mothers and not killers. And some military policy-makers foresee reopening debates about women’s participation in combat once the war is over. It is telling that although women’s deaths in Iraq get little attention in the media or from the American public, women’s involvement in abusive treatment of “detainees” at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba continue to haunt debates over acceptable interrogation techniques and American sentiments toward the war. In addition, the sexual nature of the abuse was used by some commentators to argue that women shouldn’t be in the military; and that their very presence unleashed sexual violence. Although the deaths of women in the war in Iraq received little attention, reports of women’s violence and abuse captured public imagination. Why? Why did the images of women abusers from Abu Ghraib generate so much press and media speculation? Elsewhere, I answer this question by analyzing both the media coverage and the events themselves within the context of a pornographic, or voyeuristic, way of looking at sex and violence, which is normalized through popular media. 1

The Articulation of Lynndie England to Abu Ghraib: Gender Ideologies, War, and the Construction of Reality

Hall (1980) argued that the media articulate non-necessary connections between messages and socially acceptable ideas. This research analyzes the process through which news magazines made a strong connection between Lynndie England and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and how gender affected these articulations. By making England the symbol of the scandal, the media diverted attention away from broad issues and focused on an individual while reifying dichotomous images of women.

Im Netz der Gewalt. Der Terrorfilm zwischen Horror, Zeitgeschichte und medialer Berichterstattung

Questions like “How do historical and cultural traumas affect film history?” and “How are they represented and why?” have a significant tradition in film studies. However, most approaches have been focusing on matters of content, largely neglecting the filmic form. Exploring the connection between the documentary representation of such traumatic historical events as the Vietnam War and the Abu Ghraib prison torture on the one hand, and the film language of “terror films” of the 1970s and 2000s on the other, it is possible to show that depictions of the historical horrors correspond to the specific contemporary filmic forms of the horror films.

A new approach to understanding the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal

The purpose of this study is to examine a method of predicting and understanding torture during international conflicts by applying and linking two established theoretical approaches to the Abu Ghraib case. The first theoretical approach is based on the circumplex model of family functioning focusing on cohesion, flexibility, and communication (Olson, 1995, 2000; Olson and DeFrain, 1997). In this model, social groups at the extreme points on the flexibility and cohesion dimensions have the highest level of risk for violence. The second approach is based on violentisation theory (Athens, 2003). The four stages of the violentisation process include: brutalisation, defiance, violent dominant engagements, and virulency. Extreme virulency was added as another stage. Using qualitative content analysis, the data demonstrated that the perpetrators moved through the violentisation process as their social environment moved toward the chaotic and disengaged extremes of the circumplex model. Study limitations and suggestions for further research are also addressed.