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Crime Law Soc Change (2009) 51:327349
DOI 10.1007/s10611-008-9160-2
Alette Smeulers & Sander van Niekerk
Published online: 18 November 2008# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008
Abstract The pictures of the inhuman and abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison shocked the world. The authors of this contribution will take a criminological approach to the crimes committed and will showby using an analytical framework used by organizational criminologiststhat the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib was an inevitable outcome of the War on Terror as launched by the U.S. administration in a reaction to the terrorist attack launched against it. The abuse at Abu Ghraib which violated U.S. as well as international human rights law was not caused by a few rotten apples as policymakers tried to make us believe, but was a clear example of a state crime. A state crime for which U.S. leaders within the Bush administration such as the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, might be held criminally responsible if they would be prosecuted by the ICC.
Introduction
On the morning of September 11th 2001, an unprecedented terrorist attack on symbolic and strategic buildings took place on U.S. soil. The attack caught the U.S. completely off guard and was by all accounts a shocking and traumatizing moment in American history leaving approximately 2900 people dead. From the very outset the Bush administration pointed at Osama bin Ladens Al Qaeda as the mastermind behind the attack and almost immediately started planning to locate and punish the perpetrators and everyone who in some way or another was involved. On September 15th 2001 President Bush launched the War on Terror and promised the nation in an address on television: we will smoke them out of their holes and get them dead or alive.
On April 28th 2004, CBS 60 Minutes II aired the gruesome pictures of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq at the hands of American soldiers: naked
A. Smeulers (*) : S. van Niekerk
Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlandse-mail: a.l.smeulers@rechten.vu.nl
Abu Ghraib and the War on Terrora case against Donald Rumsfeld?
328 A. Smeulers, S. van Niekerk
prisoners were piled up in a pyramid,...