We can introduce something from Australia into Susan Sontag's endeavours to make sense of the meanings of the photos from Abu Ghraib prison.
This account by Bernie Mathews of Queensland prisons. Brian says:
"To know prison you have to experience the finality of a cell door slamming shut behind your back. You have to realise the futility of hope and experience the humiliation of having to spread your buttocks for prison guards during a strip search. Then you mentally switch off to the kicks and baton blows that rain upon you as you try to breathe through the blood that flows from your nose and mouth. If you have experienced these things you will understand the world of Abu Ghraib."
"Matthews lays it all out. He talks of his own sexual abuse and sensory deprivation; he lists and explores a number of unexplained deaths; and lastly he looks at the brutalizing transformation of prisoners in the system. Through it all runs the thread of a system that knows the brutalisation is occurring, does nothing to prevent it, and sets the rules so that it is unlikely to be reported on, until it erupts into a royal commission. What a disgrace."
So let us come back to Sontag intrepretation of the Abu Ghraib photos. She says that:
"...the principal justification for holding them [the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison] is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation, and torture become inevitable.... in principle, any "information" at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners to talk. Softening them up, stressing them out --- these are the usual euphemisms for the bestial practices that have become rampant in American prisons where "suspected terrorists" are being held. Unfortunately, it seems, more than a few got "too stressed out" and died."