Abuse Abroad: Torture, Detention, Occupation, and the Moral Collapse of U.S. Power

This paper examines torture, detention, and occupation as institutional instruments of power within the United States’ military and counterterrorism campaigns in the Middle East, rejecting narratives that frame abuse as aberrational, reactive, or the result of individual misconduct. Drawing on international political ethics, human rights law, critical security studies, and social psychology, the analysis demonstrates how systems of coercion were deliberately designed, legally narrated, and culturally justified in ways that enabled widespread physical, psychological, and moral harm. Torture is treated not as an episodic violation, but as a predictable outcome of institutional structures built around secrecy, exceptionalism, and dehumanization. The paper situates U.S. practices within broader patterns of Islamophobia, racialized threat construction, and moral exceptionalism, tracing continuities from pre-9/11 surveillance and profiling through post-9/11 detention regimes, occupation governance, and contemporary policies such as the Muslim ban. It argues that the persistence of abuse despite its absolute prohibition reveals a profound ethical failure rooted in power preservation rather than security necessity. Written with an explicit moral purpose, the paper is offered as a formal ethical apology, by a U.S.-born citizen, to the individuals and communities harmed by American military, political, and institutional actions across the Middle East. By centering consequence over justification, it calls for a reorientation of political ethics away from domination and toward responsibility for sustained harm.