Abu Ghraib Prison Case Study

The torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison; a case study in State crime

Introduction:

Abu Ghraib prison was a U.S. Army detention centre for captured Iraqis from 2003 to 2006.

This is an international problem. Guantanamo Bay another prison where the use of torture is apparent and unlike the Abu Ghraib prison it is still in use today.

The main focus of this essay will be on why it is a state crime but other areas will also be covered to answer the question effectively.

Why is it a state crime?

For a crime to be seen as a state crime it needs to fall under at least one of these three definitions (Green and Ward, 2004; Michalowski, 2010):

1. Crime as law violation - Article 84 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits housing prisoners

This is because the information of the abuses happening at Abu Ghraib prison was initially ignored by the US government. When the evidence was irrefutable, the government finally reacted stating that it was an isolated incident. This was disregarded by civil society movements such as the Red Cross as they had been providing information of the abuse a year before the scandal broke. Rumsfeld the secretary of defence mentioned that it was not ‘torture’ but ‘abuse. This shows how the US government would have ignored the whole thing had the information not been released to the public and caused public

Staub’s ‘cultural self-concept’ [1989, p. 54] evidenced most strongly in countries such as Nazi Germany, modern Turkey, and Cambodia and Argentina in the 1970s)

• the clear designation of an enemy within the dominant ideology (e.g. Jews in Nazi Germany, ‘subversives’ in Argentina, Kurdish militants in Turkey – see Staub, 1989, p .62).

Most of the soldiers believed that they had done absolutely nothing wrong this can be seen in the documentary "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib". The soldier took pictures of the stripped prisoners and still to this day believes that there was nothing wrong with it. “As White House counsel, Gonzales advised President Bush in a 2002 memo that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the treatment of enemy prisoners in the so-called 'war on terror.'” Bush said ‘This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe’ (Associated Press, 2008). President agreed with the US of torture to ‘keep America