Suchergebnisse

An expert witness in legal cases involving rules of engagement and the US military murder of prisoners, Prof. Mestrovic exposes profound contradictions and systemic flaws that confuse criminal brutality and heroism, making victims of soldiers like Sergeant Michael Leahy who won a purple heart but also was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2009.

We analyze the court-martial of Sabrina Harman, one of the alleged `seven rotten apples' associated with specific incidents of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, vis-a-vis the Parsonian distinction between `instrumental' and `expressive' pattern-variables. The Parsonian distinction between instrumental and expressive roles served a multitude of functions simultaneously, and especially given the masculine code of the military. We move beyond Parsons to introduce the new concepts of `expressive abuse', `expressive torture', and `instrumental misuse of expressive functions' to capture the overall thrust of the courts-martial as well as important aspects of the abuse at Abu Ghraib as revealed through testimony, government reports, interviews, and other sources of data. Both co-authors were participant-observers at the courts-martial of Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England, and draw upon the testimony and data from those trials in addition to the documents that are cited.

In a continued attempt to comprehend Durkheim's original understanding of anomie as a form of dérèglement or derangement, we begin with a discussion of how the experiences of abuse at Abu Ghraib fit his model of a deranged, anomic social system. To bolster our interpretation we show how this, more accurate, understanding of anomie as derangement is useful for understanding war crimes in general, an area where Durkheim's concept of anomie has been infrequently applied as a descriptor for research and analysis. Additionally, the concept of post‐emotionalism is used to capture a number of related themes in this discussion pertaining to the sociology of knowledge: how and why original meanings of both the abuse at Abu Ghraib and Durkheim's concept of derangement have been taken out of context and result in displaced emotions, scapegoating and misplaced responsibility in intellectual discourse as well as the military justice system.