> How did guard's prisoner abuse in the U.S. South turn into broader atrocities like Abu Graib? One extremely subtle connection that we could make here is the

> How did guard's prisoner abuse in the U.S. South turn into broader atrocities like Abu Graib? One extremely subtle connection that we could make here is the fact that some of the key perpetrators and leaders of the abuse were FORMER SOUTHERN PRISON GUARDS. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu... "Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained: 'What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.'" The guy that pulled the longest sentence for the abuse was a prison guard between stints in Iraq 1 and Iraq 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Graner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Graner Not really subtle, here. This stuff was all over the reportage of Abu Gharaib at the time and an 'educated American citizen' might well have actually noticed if they were inclined to notice things. I would suggest that being inclined to notice this sort of thing isn't that psychologically pleasant; making Abu Gharaib into a bizarre exception ("war is hell") is way more comforting than paying attention to all that investigative journalism about what prisons are like in the US. Just because the journalism exists certainly doesn't imply that people we 'paying attention'; your overly confident skepticism and lack of grasp on basic facts on Abu Gharaib is a fine illustrative example. I'm not going to drag out the links to stuff like this in US prisons but reading through stories about abuses in prisons in the US south is pretty gruesome reading and not hard to find. If you're actually interested, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/advocacy/prisons/u-s.htm https://www.hrw.org/legacy/advocacy/prisons/u-s.htm is a decent (if old) starting point. I will just simply assert that upon seeing the Abu Gharaib stuff, I was struck not by shock but by familiarity having read a fair bit of stuff about that in the 90s.