Deviance of American Society during the Bush Years Literature Essay

Deviance of American Society during the Bush Years
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Deviance of American Society during the Bush Years
Through Susan Sontag’s and Rory Kennedy’s point of view, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison had no mercy when torturing the Iraqi captives. Evidence from soldiers and victims show that such actions were preceded by normalization of torture in American culture. It also resulted from the construction of a demonized Arab by Americans during the Bush era. Several explanations also indicate that the military and contractors in Iraq committed the atrocities under the influence of their senior personnel. While the soldiers were responsible for their acts, Sontag and Kennedy suggest that they were overwhelmed by the acceptability of torture. Additionally, the entire American society during the Bush years considered the victims as demons.
In Kennedy’s The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, incidents of detainee torture are presented through affidavits, interviews, and testimonies from courts. The events described by victims, for instance, are remarkably comparable to those narrated by the culprits. The overall implication is that at no point had there been two versions of what transpired in Abu Ghraib (Kennedy, 2007). The detainees narrate a variety of torture methods that bear consistent themes of both sexual and physical abuse. In further detail, the victims suggest instances of rape, sexual harassment, treatment of detainees like wild animals, and finally, defamation of religious symbols and rituals by the United States military.
While these incidences are shocking to normal humans, those soldiers found guilty do not refute any of these accounts. However, the accused military personnel indicate that they only acted under orders from their seniors (Kennedy, 2007). They also suggest that the torture was meant to force hardened prisoners into speaking during interrogation (Kennedy, 2007). Furthermore, the testimonies in the documentary bring out the culprits as insolent. They see themselves as only scapegoats to the normalization of torture by administrative decisions and the whole of America during Bush’s era.
Some soldiers, arguably even before 9/11, were schooled to destroy Iraqi lives. When he asked the battle rules during his first day as a gunner in Iraq, Ken Davis was instructed to shoot anything that seemed like an enemy (Kennedy, 2007). Davis, however, described that” everything looked like the enemy out there (Kennedy, 2007).” Other soldiers had different accounts that suggested the enemy as any man with a beard and without a turban. The fact that the United States military did not bother to account for the ci...