The horrifying photos of young Iraqi men abused by young American men and women have shocked the world in their vivid depiction of human degradation in much the same way as the explosive televised images of the terrorists’ destruction of the World Trade Center did on September 11th. The “unthinkable” became imaginable in both scenarios. We realized then that some people hated America enough to commit suicide in the process of killing thousands of innocent victims and demolishing cherished national symbols. But instead of asking why, to try to understand how this could have happened, our leaders asked only who. That person-centered framing motivated the search-and-destroy mission for those evil individuals responsible for spreading terror in our homeland. But we are no closer to understanding the conditions that breed terrorism so that we can work to prevent or modify them.
Now we are forced to acknowledge that some of our beloved soldiers have committed barbarous acts of cruelty and sadism when they were supposed to be on a mission of maintaining law, order, and democracy, modeling the best of American values. Again, there is the same rush to the person-centered analysis of human behavior, which blames flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignores the host of contributing factors in the situation in which they were embedded. Unless we learn the dynamics of why, we will never be able to counteract the powerful systemic forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators.
It is easy and expedient for the military brass to point accusing fingers at the soldiers identified as the culprits in this abuse. Similarly, the President and his staff have weighed in with a pledge to get “to the bottom of this.” I believe it is time to get to the top of this ugly affair. We need to focus on the real sources of this abuse of power – starting with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pentagon officers who claimed this was an isolated incident while they held in their hands Red Cross reports from last summer of rampant abuses in all the military prisons, especially the little shop of horrors in Abu Ghraib. Of course, those perpetrators responsible for these immoral deeds should suffer sanctions if found guilty upon careful investigation by an impartial non-military team. However, we must look at their guilt in context.
Should these few Army reservists be blamed as the “bad apples” in a good barrel of American soldiers, as our leaders have rushed to characterize them? Or, are they once-good apples who have been soured and corrupted by an evil barrel? For me, that evil barrel is filled with the vinegar of this needless war and maintained by infusions of deceptive rhetoric from those charged with guiding these soldiers. I argue for the latter situational perspective on evil after having engaged for decades in systematically studying the conditions that can induce good people to do bad things to others.
Like Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib, I was once a prison superintendent with no experience or training in corrections. My guards soon began doing terrible things that were comparable to many of the horrors reportedly inflicted on the Iraqi citizens who were being held in “pre-trial detention,” for vague security reasons, without recourse to legal counsel or family. My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary for the least infractions of arbitrary rules, made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, and worse. As the boredom of the job got to some of the guards, they began using the prisoners as their playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to play. Over time, these amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I closed down the Stanford prison. Perhaps the military should follow suit in Iraq.
My prison has come to be known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which ordinary, intelligent college student volunteers filled the ranks of randomly assigned prisoners and guards. Although everyone knew it was just an experiment and all fellow participants were other students, the line between simulation and reality was breached, and it became a psychological prison of incredible intensity. The planned two-week study had to be terminated after only six days because it was out of control. Good boys chosen for their normality suffered emotional breakdowns as they became powerless prisoners in a setting that made them feel totally helpless and hopeless. Other young men chosen for their mental health and history of positive values eased into the character of sadistic guards, able to inflict suffering on their fellow students without compunction. And those guards who did not personally debase the prisoners failed to confront the worst of their comrades; they looked the other way and allowed evil to ripen.
Human behavior is much more under the control of situational forces than most of us recognize or want to acknowledge. In a novel situation that implicitly permits the suspension of usual moral values, many of us can morph into creatures alien to our usual natures. My research, like Milgram’s seminal research on blind obedience to authority, has catalogued the conditions for stirring the crucible of human nature in negative directions. Some of the necessary ingredients are as follows: diffusion of responsibility, anonymity, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do not intervene, permission from authorities for transgressions, and a setting of power differentials between the protagonists.
These situational processes were apparently also operating in that little Iraqi shop of horrors. Add to these secrecy, no accountability, no visible chain of command, conflicting demands on the guards from civilian interrogators, no clear rules enforced for prohibited acts, encouragement for breaking the will of the detainees, and bystanders who observed the evil but did not blow the whistle. Understanding the how of this evil does not excuse the what, but simply blaming the who avoids understanding both the how and the why.
We must learn from this tragic event how to avoid repeating it. And we must not permit the authorities to deflect the blame and responsibility that they must share for these terrible acts by accusing those who went into the Bush Administration’s preemptive war proud Americans and return as disgraced, sadistic prison guards. The arrogance of power that spawned the “shock and awe” of military might must be humbled by dismay and disgust at these revelations of abuse.
It is time for all Americans to reflect deeply on the fabricated justifications for continuing the war in Iraq that is killing, maiming, and demeaning our young men and women who have been put in harm’s way by the president for spurious reasons. And we must all be concerned that the lies about protecting our national security from terrorism by going to war against Iraq and its evil dictator, Saddam Hussein (who was going to give his weapons of mass destruction to the evil Osama bin Laden to use against the U.S.) will haunt us as we become less secure from the global terrorism that has been energized by this destructive war and its images of abuse.
