United States Army

The United States Army is examined through the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal as more than the setting for individual soldiers’ misconduct: the episode exposes a gap between public military principles and the unofficial practices that can operate beneath them. The book traces how reports of abuse were disregarded before the scandal became public, how the Army’s explanations focused on training and direct orders, and how photographic documentation made humiliation part of the abuse’s public and institutional meaning.

Public account and ignored warnings

In the aftermath of photographs showing Iraqi prisoners abused by American soldiers, George W. Bush presented the acts as isolated crimes that did not represent the values the United States claimed to defend: democracy, freedom, and personal dignity. The book acknowledges that public disclosure and scandal had some significance: unlike a fully closed political system, the case became visible and placed the administration on the defensive. But publicity alone did not establish that the conduct was exceptional or that the institution had responded responsibly before it became news.

For months before the scandal broke, the International Committee of the Red Cross had repeatedly sent the United States Army authorities in Iraq reports about abuse in military prisons. The reports were systematically ignored. The account therefore rejects the idea that officials lacked warning: the authorities acknowledged the crime only after media disclosure forced it into public view. This sequence makes the scandal a story not just of what happened in detention, but of the conditions under which institutional knowledge was disregarded and then publicly recognized.

The Army’s response also included restricting guards’ access to digital cameras and phones with video-display capabilities. In the book’s interpretation, the significance of this measure lies in its apparent aim: preventing the images from circulating, rather than preventing the abuse itself. The distinction turns documentation into part of the institutional problem. The photographs did not simply record conduct; their capacity to become public evidence was itself something the authorities sought to control.

Training, rules, and the form of abuse

The Army command’s immediate explanation was that the soldiers had not been properly taught the Geneva Conventions’ rules for treating prisoners of war. The book treats this defense as inadequate: presenting the abuse as a failure to teach rules does not explain why basic prohibitions against humiliation and torture would require special instruction. The explanation shifts attention toward training while leaving the practices and pressures surrounding the soldiers insufficiently addressed.

The account distinguishes the methods described at Abu Ghraib from those associated with Saddam Hussein’s regime. It characterizes the latter as emphasizing the direct infliction of pain, while the American soldiers’ abuse emphasized psychological humiliation. Photographs were integral to this distinction: prisoners were made to pose, and the perpetrators appeared alongside them, smiling. The images thus joined the act of humiliation to its recording, unlike the secrecy associated in the book with Saddam Hussein’s torture practices.

The book reads the posed scenes as staged tableaux and relates their appearance to American performance art and a broader culture of cruelty. That comparison does not make the prison scenes art or reduce them to spectacle. Instead, it directs attention to the recognizable forms of public humiliation that, in the author’s argument, also appear in initiation rituals within closed communities. The Army’s conduct is placed within that cultural frame: the abuse is presented not as an inexplicable departure from American life, but as an extreme manifestation of practices that can be normalized in other settings until they exceed a tolerated limit.

Unofficial permission and institutional responsibility

The book rejects a choice between two explanations: that the soldiers acted on explicit orders from senior officials, or that they were independent mutineers and traitors. It argues that the abuse was neither simply individual evil nor the execution of direct, written commands. Instead, it was legitimized through an unofficial code of conduct: private hints, pressure, and directives that could be communicated without formal documentation. In this account, the absence of a direct order does not prove the absence of institutional permission.

This distinction shapes the book’s criticism of the Army command’s assurances. If abusive practices are sustained through informal expectations, then asking whether a written order existed misses how authority can operate. The comparison with Ku Klux Klan lynchings and abuses by Catholic priests makes the same argumentative point: describing such acts as betrayals of a tradition can conceal the possibility that they emerge from its own disavowed underside. The comparisons concern the relation between public ideals and tolerated practices, not an equivalence among the different acts or institutions.

The book also argues that Abu Ghraib was not an isolated case. On May 6, 2004, Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that the released photographs represented only a fraction of what might emerge, including more severe material involving rape and murder. The episode therefore carries consequences beyond the images already made public: the Army’s problem is presented as part of a wider practice whose full extent was not yet visible.

Public ideals and the legal boundary

The Abu Ghraib analysis connects the Army’s practices to the status of prisoners held outside secure legal protections. In the discussion of Guantanamo, prisoners are described as people who survived military bombing and were then treated as though survival did not restore their claim to ordinary legal standing. The book uses this argument to describe a condition in which a person remains biologically alive while being treated as legally excluded. The Army’s detention practices and the conduct at Abu Ghraib are placed within a wider account of state power operating where law’s protections are suspended or made ineffective.

The central institutional tension is therefore not simply that conduct contradicted declared values. The book argues that public commitments to dignity and lawful treatment can coexist with an unofficial system that humiliates prisoners, restricts the circulation of evidence, and avoids leaving explicit orders. The Abu Ghraib photographs made that contradiction visible: they exposed practices that the official account could disown, while the reports preceding the scandal showed that the underlying problem had not been invisible to authorities.