Politics & Power Quote by John Pilger

Pilger’s sentence performs a familiar, deliberately abrasive maneuver: he grants the obvious caveat - not every American in Iraq is a torturer - then yanks it away as insufficient comfort. The quick correction (“of course they’re not”) isn’t softness; it’s inoculation. He’s anticipating the knee-jerk rebuttal (“you’re painting all soldiers as monsters”) and pre-empting it so he can steer the argument where he wants it: from individual morality to institutional design.

The key word is “systematic.” Pilger admits he can’t quantify (“I don’t know how many are doing it”) and then claims he doesn’t need to, because the scandal isn’t the body count of abusers but the structure that produces them. That’s the subtext: torture isn’t an accident, an “apple” problem, or a few bad nights in a war zone. It’s policy, training, incentive, and impunity - a bureaucracy of violence that keeps functioning even when everyone insists it’s an exception.

Contextually, this is Pilger working in the long shadow of Abu Ghraib, Black Sites, and the post-9/11 legal contortions that made cruelty sound procedural. His language (“torture and murder”) is intentionally blunt, refusing euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation,” because euphemism is part of the machine. The intent is less to condemn Americans as a people than to indict a military and political culture that can absorb revelations, label them “isolated,” and continue - smoothly, systematically.