"The Textual Mediation of Denial: Congress, Abu Ghraib, and the Construction of an Isolated Incident."

The rhetorical techniques by which governments deny, justify, and qualify alleged instances of torture have been well documented. Sociologists, however, have neglected the social contexts in which officials confront allegations of torture, as well as officials' use of evidence to strengthen their own or weaken competing claims about torture. Relying on findings from a qualitative content analysis of seven Senate Armed Services Committee hearings held in 2004 on “detainee abuse” at Abu Ghraib prison, this article examines the processes by which hearing participants portrayed the violence there as an isolated incident. Building on James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium's (2003) “constructionist analytics,” I examine the textual mediation of claims-making in the hearings, focusing on the interplay between textual realities of detainee abuse and the interpretive uses to which hearing participants put these realities. I show that developments in the textual environment of the hearings, particularly the development of a textually mediated vantage on events that “really occurred” throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, provided hearing participants with rich interpretive materials to downplay and rationalize instances of abuse that occurred in places other than Abu Ghraib prison. These findings suggest that official denial is sustained by diverse claims-making activities, including the production of a textual reality of human rights violations. The findings also extend the purview of social problems theory to account for the role of texts in the construction of social problems.