Torture or Abuse? Avoiding the T-Word

By Brigitte L. Nacos and Oscar Torres-Reyna

An excerpt from Fueling Our Fears: Stereotyping, Media Coverage, and Public Opinion of Muslim Americans

Whereas the American news media had no problem using the term “torture” in the hypothetical debate before the Abu Ghraib revelations, members of the fourth estate were terribly reluctant to use the T-word once they had shown and the public had seen the graphic scenes of actual torture at the Iraqi detention facility. While it may be entirely possible that news organizations did not want to believe that Americans were torturers before the Abu Ghraib story broke, the pictorial proof of actual torture did away with any doubts. Yet, an ironic consequence of the Abu Ghraib revelations was the drastic decline of the use of the T-word in pertinent news accounts. Instead, anchors, correspondents, and reporters themselves preferred terms like “abuse,” “alleged abuse,” “mistreatment,” and “wrongdoing.” As Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “Regarding the Torture of Others,”

There was also the avoidance of the word “torture” [on the part of the Bush administration]. The prisoners had possibly been the objects of “abuse,” eventually of “humiliation”—that was the most to be admitted. “My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. “And therefore I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.”

It seemed that the news media took their cue from the defense secretary’s linguistic skills. …[I]n the year following the breaking news of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the three major television networks and two of the country’s leading elite newspapers chose the term “abuse” far more often than “torture” in stories about Abu Ghraib. ABC News aired 158 pertinent stories that contained the term “abuse,” and 43 of these stories mentioned both “abuse” and “torture.” So a total of 115 segments mentioned only “abuse” in the context of Abu Ghraib and none referred solely to “torture.” The linguistic choices were very similar at CBS News and NBC News. Thus, CBS News broadcast 160 stories that mentioned “abuse” and 55 containing “torture,” but while 118 news segments used the term “abuse” only, just 13 mentioned “torture” only. NBC News used the term “abuse” in a total of 186 news segments, “torture” in merely 35 stories. More importantly, the network aired 151 stories with the term “abuse” only and just 7 that contained the T-word only.

During the same time period, the print media, too, chose the term “abuse” far more often than “torture” in the context of Abu Ghraib. For example, whereas only 144 articles in the New York Times mentioned “torture” and not “abuse,” 508 news items contained the word “abuse” and not “torture.” Similarly, the Washington Post published ten times more stories that mentioned “abuse” and not “torture” (380) in the context of Abu Ghraib than articles containing the term “torture” only (37).

Equally revealing was the reluctance of the print press to use the term “torture” in headlines above stories dealing with the Abu Ghraib case. In the year following the Abu Ghraib revelations, the New York Times, for example, carried 42 news items with the word “torture” in their headlines and “Abu Ghraib” in the full text. Of these, 24 were letters-to-the-editor, one was an editorial, another one an essay on torture by Susan Sontag, and three were book reviews dealing with volumes on Abu Ghraib and torture. Thus, only 13 news articles that mentioned Abu Ghraib in the full text used the T-word in the headlines. Conversely, of the 130 news items that mentioned “abuse” in their headlines, 12 were letters-to-the-editor and one was an editorial, so that 117 pertinent straight news stories contained the term “abuse” in the headlines…

Just as the news media seemed uncomfortable in using the T-word to describe the treatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison, survey organizations, too, used “abuse” far more often than “torture” in questions relating to the fate of prisoners in Iraq. Thus, the IPOLL archive of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut listed eighty relevant questions mentioning only “abuse” relating to the treatment of prisoners versus ten referring just to “torture.” Not surprisingly, the majority of Americans felt that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was “abuse” rather than “torture.” When asked a few weeks after being exposed to the Abu Ghraib visuals, “Do you think what American soldiers did to prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad amounts to torture, or do you think it was abuse, but not torture?", 60 percent said it was “abuse but not torture,” while only 29 percent felt it was “torture.” The same survey found that 35 percent of the public found the torture of suspected terrorists to be “acceptable in some cases,” while 63 percent of respondents said that torture is never acceptable. Yet, 46 percent said that physical abuse short of torture is acceptable in some of these cases, and just 52 percent felt that physical abuse is never acceptable. With the pictures of the Abu Ghraib scandal fresh in mind, 51 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. government “as a matter of policy” was using “torture” in the war against terrorism, while 43 percent did not think so. However, 66 percent thought that it was U.S. policy to use “physical abuse” in fighting terrorists, and 29 percent did not believe so.

When asked about specific methods designed to get information from suspected terrorists, a majority of Americans approved of depriving detainees of sleep, bombarding them with loud noise for long periods of time, and keeping hoods over their heads, but rejected other measures, such as threatening family members, applying electric shock, or holding heads under water. Still it is disconcerting that sizeable minorities were supportive of threatening to shoot a suspect (41 percent), exposing him to extreme heart and cold (40 percent), withholding food and water (38 percent), punching and kicking him (29 percent), making the prisoner go naked (25 percent), and holding a suspect’s head under water (21 percent). Moreover, as memories of the Abu Ghraib torture pictures faded, Americans were less inclined to agree with the statement that torture is “never justified” as a means to force suspected terrorists to reveal important information. By December 2004, more than seven months after the Abu Ghraib story broke, only 27 percent of the public rejected the torture of terrorist suspects categorically, while 69 percent found it justified to varying degrees, namely “often” (15 percent), “sometimes” (30 percent), or “rarely” (24 percent). But although the majority of Americans believed, as mentioned above, that the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was “abuse,” not “torture,” pollsters did not ask whether respondents found the “abuse” of suspected terrorists justified or not.

The bottom line is simply this: while most Americans were aware of what had happened at Abu Ghraib and one in three claimed to be “angry” about the “apparent abuse” of prisoners by U.S. soldiers, there was no public outrage. As Joseph Lelyveld reported,

Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the revelations that keep coming. “You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurred,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reactions of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. “I think they want it blurry.”

Excerpted from Fueling Our Fears: Stereotyping, Media Coverage, and Public Opinion of Muslim Americans, by Brigitte L. Nacos and Oscar Torres-Reyna © 2007 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Please contact the publisher for permission to copy, distribute, or reprint.