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160 Chapter 12 A Globalized Militarized Prison Juggernaut The Case of Abu Ghraib Dawn L. Rothe From the time Saddam Hussein (the former president of Iraq) came to power in 1979, Abu Ghraib was the symbol of death and torture . Over thirty thousand Iraqis were executed there and thousands more were tortured and mutilated only to be returned to society as visible evidence to others of Saddam’s power (American Enterprise Institute 2004; Kupelian 2004). This included amputations of body parts, rape, the removal of tongues, and systematic beatings. Executions were routine at Abu Ghraib. The pattern continued through the 1990s until October 2002, when Saddam granted amnesty to most prisoners in Iraq including those at Abu Ghraib. Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib was completely abandoned, leaving only the memories of executions, torture, and mutilations that occurred under Saddam’s rule. After the fall of Baghdad (March 2003), coalition forces (i.e., the United States and United Kingdom) needed a detention center for the growing numbers of insurgents and civilians captured by US forces. Abu Ghraib was chosen by Ambassador Paul Bremer, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Less than one month after the invasion, the Abu Ghraib prison complex was stripped of everything that was removable . Coalition authorities had the cells cleaned and repaired, floors were tiled, and toilets and showers were installed, all in preparation to become a place of detention for Iraqi resisters (Danner 2004a). Bremer’s choice of Abu Ghraib as a detention operations center placed a strict detention mission-driven unit assigned to operate in the rear of enemy lines in the middle of a combat environment.1 To Iraqis, the facility served in the national imagination as a constant reminder of past abuses that coincided with the US occupation and abuses as suspected resisters or supporters of Saddam were taken away bound and hooded often in the middle of the night The Case of Abu Ghraib 161 (International Committee of the Red Cross 2004). An Iraqi translator alluded to the connection of past with present represented at Abu Ghraib when he said, “I always knew the Americans would bring electricity back to Baghdad. I just never thought they’d be shooting it up my ass” (November 2003, quoted in Hersh 2004, 29). Globalizing American Hegemony: The Supermax Phenomenon Abu Ghraib was not, nor does it remain, an isolated phenomenon. Negligible conditions, ill treatment, and torture of prisoners continue within the confines of many supermax prisons that have resulted from the American hegemonic spread of “supermax” mentalities and the ideology that guides the current state of a US militarized criminal justice system (Hill and Beger 2009). After all, the use of untrained personnel and the mixing of job duties of the military police are symptomatic of what we have seen in the US policing industry including that which has been implemented in supermax prisons. Though focused primarily on the UK experience, Tony Jefferson’s (1990, 16) seminal scholarly piece on paramilitary policing is quite applicable to the current US situation. He defines paramilitary policing as “the application of (quasi)-military training, equipment, philosophy and organization to questions of policing.” This includes the use of military hardware (semiautomatic and automatic firearms, armored vehicles, military-style uniforms, such as jumpsuits and Kevlar vest and helmets, etc.) as well as an emphasis on intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, sharing information, and cooperation including branches of the military. Furthermore, even activity that is not legally defined as criminal but is seen as defiant, such as the insurgency in response to the invasion of Iraq, or other things deemed as potential public disturbances are accorded resources and responded to with this militarized approach (Muzzatti 2005). As Peter Kraska (1993, 1996, 1999) and his colleagues (Kraska and Kappeler 1997; Kraska and Paulsen 1997) demonstrated for several years before the 2001 terrorist attacks, the 1990s saw a rise in the number of US paramilitary police units, an expansion and escalation of their activity, and a normalization of paramilitarism into mainstream policing, with a direct link between paramilitary policing and US militarism (Muzzatti 2005). Kraska (2007, 3) defines this militarism as an ideology that “stresses the use of force as the most appropriate and efficacious means to solve problems.” On the other hand, militarization is the implementation of that ideology. As with the war on terror and the increased use of supermax detention centers to house those in opposition and the current US expansionism of the ideology and use of supermax...

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