RULE OF LAW BY TORTURE

In the months following the invasion, President George W. Bush began to emphasize bringing democracy and the rule of law to Iraq instead of preempting the threat of Saddam Hussein's never found weapons of mass destruction. In a speech given to the National Endowment for Democracy (Bush 2003), the president insisted that democratic societies “protect freedom with the consistent and impartial rule of law.”

However, within a year of the invasion, Americans were shocked to find their military charged with torturing prisoners in violation of international rules of law in the very same Abu Ghraib prison where Saddam's regime practiced some of its most notorious human rights abuses. As we saw in Chapter 1, Saddam's use of torture was not a secret and instead was a legal authoritarian resource openly used to terrorize would-be threats to the regime.

The American use of torture by law was something different. Its use of torture was unknown to the public until the famous photos made it impossible for Americans to ignore.