Introductory Thoughts and Overview

Abstract

When it comes to reports of violence, torture, murder, mass murder and genocide, the public is always shocked. In most cases the immediate reaction is to claim the perpetrators were ‘insane’ or ‘abnormal’, in short: not ‘like us’. The scandal provoked by the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq by US soldiers in 2003 revealed this again;1 later, similar incidents involving British soldiers were discovered.2 Particularly scandalous were the sheer number of digital pictures and videos the US soldiers took of their ‘activities’ inside the prison: 1,325 images and 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, and 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees.3 In the end only a few soldiers were sentenced — most prominent among them Private Lynndie England, Specialist Charles A. Graner, and Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II.