Textuality and the Social Organization of Denial: Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the Meanings of U.S. Interrogation Policies

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that denial is a socially organized and culturally mediated process. This article furthers the study of socially organized denial by theorizing and empirically examining the role of texts in official denial. I examine the ways that institutional documents serve as resources for state officials to interpret and typify instances of state violence. To do so, I draw on a qualitative content analysis of 10 U.S. Congressional hearings that focus on the violence against detainees in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib and Guant anamo. Though comparable acts of violence were committed at both facilities, I show that military officials employed different variants of interpretive denial to account for the two cases. Underlying these variants of denial were different descriptions of the connection between the violence and institutional texts that established authorized interrogation practices. Specifically, military officials causally isolated Abu Ghraib, denying the link between Interrogation Rules of Engagement in Iraq and the violence at the prison. Officials, on the other hand, interpreted the instances of violence at Guant anamo as expressions of lawful, institutionally available interrogation techniques. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of denial, interpretive work in organizational contexts, and human rights.

Visions of Hungarian Artificial Intelligence Specialists About the Future of Work and Their Roles

“…The optimistic nature of their expectations regarding the future of work and the view of technology as a value-neutral tool with often positive effects may have contributed to the interviewees' legitimisation of their own actions and explain why they did not think about social problems and ethical dilemmas linked to AI. In that sense, techno-optimism involves risks: if the focus is only on the positive, then people, organisations, and societies will fail to deal with worst-case scenarios (Rosso, 2014). Mittelstadt (2019) argues that the adverse effects of AI developers' work are not as immediate and observable, as is often true of medical decision-making, which can lead to unethical behaviour.…”

U.S. sociology and the Iraq War

“…It is generally only after egregious breeches of shared values when large numbers of Americans become aware of the humanitarian impacts of their government's military policies, such as in the wake of the release of photos and videos of torture and prisoner abuse at the U.S.‐administered Abu Ghraib prison. In such instances, Del Rosso (, ) and Hooks and Mosher () identify and document how officials effectively draw upon a repertoire of strategies of denial to argue that the U.S. government should not be held responsible for systematically violating humanitarian norms. Through these strategies, officials argue that behaviors that might otherwise be regarded as humanitarian crimes were in fact only “isolated incidents” committed by a few “bad apples,” which had nothing to do with U.S. policy or war‐fighting strategies.…”

“Its Own Kind of Torture”: Denial, Acknowledgment, and the Debate About Force Feeding at Guantánamo Bay

“…This, in turn, drives apologists to admit that the alleged event occurred (Cohen ; Del Rosso ; Shor ). But rather than acknowledge that torture occurred, apologists use interpretive denial , renaming the alleged event with a less potent term (Del Rosso ). They may use legalistic discourse to recast allegations of torture (Cohen ), as when former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said of Abu Ghraib: “What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture” (as quoted in Hochschild ).…”