The Geneva Conventions

The Geneva Conventions are invoked in the book’s discussion of the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal as the rules governing the treatment of war prisoners. Their significance here lies less in a description of their provisions than in how military command appealed to them when explaining the guards’ conduct.

The Rules in the Abu Ghraib Discussion

The United States Army command’s immediate explanation was that the soldiers had not been properly taught the Geneva Conventions’ rules for treating prisoners. The account presents this as a response to the abuse at Abu Ghraib, not as evidence that the rules themselves were absent or that their specific provisions had been examined.

The Book’s Criticism of the Explanation

The author challenges the explanation by asking, in effect, whether soldiers need instruction not to humiliate and torture prisoners. This turns attention from training as a procedural deficiency to the inadequacy of treating basic limits on conduct as knowledge that must first be taught. The passage does not detail individual provisions or establish what instruction particular guards received; it uses the command’s explanation to question how the abuse was being accounted for.