Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things

• Author: Mark T. Schnakenberg
• Position: Judge Advocate, U.S. Marine Corps
• Pages: 195-203

2010] BOOK REVIEWS195

TORTURED: WHEN GOOD SOLDIERS DO BAD THINGS1

REVIEWED BY MAJOR MARK T. SCHNAKENBERG*

The war waged within the detention centers and the

damage it does to both soldiers and detainees is far

subtler than what happens in combat. When compared to

soldiers who have had their faces melted and limbs

blown off by IEDs, it is difficult to see the soldiers who

worked in prisons as true victims of war.2

I. Introduction

In Tortured: When Good Soldiers Do Bad Things (Tortured), Justine

Sharrock makes a sweeping attempt to portray all soldiers assigned to the

Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib detention facilities as torturers. To

Sharrock, they are merely victims of a higher chain-of-command and

must unquestionably follow orders. Tortured serves as excellent

entertainment reading and even offers some insight for military criminal

attorneys. However, the book ultimately fails as scholarly writing

because it lacks accuracy, reliability, and legal perspective. As the

following sections explore, Sharrock defeats her own thesis by taking a

number of shortcuts.

II. The Vague Concept of “Torture Lite” and the Failure to Define

Torture

With torture in the title of her book, any reader would expect the

author to define the term with clarity and precision. The concept

“torture” is admittedly difficult to define, and a universal definition has

been the source of much consternation between scholars and

practitioners in the United States and the international community.3

* Judge Advocate, U.S. Marine Corps. Student, 59th Judge Advocate Officer Graduate

Course, The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, U.S. Army,

Charlottesville, Virginia.

1 JUSTINE SHARROCK, TORTURED: WHEN GOOD SOLDIERS DO BAD THINGS (2010).

2 Id. at 235.

3 Torture is defined by the 1984 UN Convention against Torture as follows: