"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 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 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...