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May 11, 2004 PBS transcript of interview with four experts on psychology of abusive behaviors. Among the group is the professor who ran the Stanford University student/prisoner study. The George Bush quote is a reference. President Bush was not in the discussion.
I couldn't copy the entire transcript, so after an attempt to do some editing, I've included the link to the site.
May 11, 2004
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba has accused soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison of "incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses." Experts examine the psychology of abusive behavior.
MARGARET WARNER: Americans have been shocked by photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. military guards. The degrading treatment of the detainees is horrifying. So, too, has been the apparent attitude of the guards.
In one photo, a female soldier grins as she points to several naked, hooded men. In another, two smiling guards give the thumbs-up sign as they pose with a pile of naked prisoners.
Political leaders from President Bush on down expressed disgust and a conviction that the behavior shown was a gross aberration for U.S. soldiers and for all Americans.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: What took place in that prison does not represent America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom. I keep repeating, but it's true. It doesn't reflect how we think. This is not America. America's a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect.
MARGARET WARNER: But the hometown paper for the military police company involved, the Cumberland, Md. "Times-News" had a different take in an editorial Sunday.
"Visiting journalists search in vain," the paper said, "for some dark local element that gave birth to the monstrous actions in Abu Ghraib. We are America, for better and worse."
The psychology behind abusive behavior
MARGARET WARNER: And for more on the psychology behind abusive behavior like this, we turn to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who's studied Nazi doctors and Vietnam veterans among others.
His latest book on violence is called "Superpower Syndrome." Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a retired psychology professor at West Point. His new book is "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill" Jay Winik, a professor and war historian, and author of "April 1865: The Month That Saved America."
And Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University. In 1971, he conducted a landmark study in which two dozen college students were directed to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated jail with disturbing results. Welcome to you all.
And Professor Lifton, let me begin with you. Why do apparently ordinary people commit brutal acts like this?
DR. ROBERT JAY LIFTON: I would understand it as what I call an atrocity- producing situation. In studying Vietnam and what happened there and interviewing Vietnam veterans I found that the situation they were in was so structured psychologically and militarily that ordinary people, no better or worse than you or me, could walk into it and commit atrocities.
And I think as different as Iraq is, we have a parallel situation of a counterinsurgency war with great confusion as to who the enemy is and difficulty in tracking him down or identifying him, enormous fear and frustration and hostility from the population, and this creates a group process rather than any kind of individual aberration, a group process of atrocity.
It works from many levels because as we've heard there are sometimes instructions given from those in charge of interrogation, people from military intelligence, or sometimes there's just a kind of indirect suggestion that softening up processes can be tough and abusive.
And then there's still a higher level of high-ranking officers and war planners who demand information from interrogations and apply pressure on those military intelligence officers. So here you have a three-tier dynamic and the foot soldiers, the MPs and the civilian contractors are caught in this atrocity-producing situation. They adapt to the group and they join in.
Potential for brutality in anyone?
MARGARET WARNER: And, of course we don't know the actual situation in this case because that will remain for further hearings and the court's martial but let me ask Professor Zimbardo, your own studies, your own research, do you agree that there's the potential for if not atrocity certainly brutality in just about anyone and if so what triggers it?
PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO: Well I agree with everything my colleague, Robert Jay Lifton, said. Human nature has the potential to be good or evil. It depends entirely on the situation around us. These young men and women who are being scapegoated, being rushed to trial, rushed to judgment, were embedded in an evil barrel.
What happened is, in my study, we took good young then... men, put the them in an evil barrel of a simulated prison and out came corrupted young men who did sadistic acts very similar to what you see in Abu Ghraib, chaining them, making them naked, putting bags over their heads, making them clean out toilet bowls with their hands and at the end simulating sodomy, having the prisoners simulate sodomy. And these were college students to other college students.
MARGARET WARNER: What drove that? I mean did you ask them?
PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO: No, no. Just the opposite. I was a superintendent of the prison who said no physical violence but they waited until I went to sleep because for a variety reasons. First of all, prison situations are one of enormous power differentials. Guards have total power over prisoners who have no power. Unless there's strict leadership, unless there's clear leadership that prevents the abuse of power, that power will seep out. That power, that sadistic impulse will dominate. That's what we saw in our prison. That's what you see in Abu Ghraib.
My sense is that these young men and women are certainly not... certainly didn't go in as bad apples -- just as in our prison they went in as good American soldiers. They've come out shamed. Their future is destroyed. What happens is what the system is doing is taking the blame away from those who created the barrel.
All of those who should have been in command, all of those who should have been in charge, the military intelligence that clearly, clearly influence, suggested, push, enhanced the use of these terrible tactics. But all of... the system wants to be preserved. That's why we're rushing to judgment to these young men and women.
MARGARET WARNER: Jay Winik, let's broaden it out even further from the United States. What does history tell us about what triggers atrocities?
JAY WINIK: Right. What history tells us is that there's just a terrible logic of war where ordinary or even extraordinary people can just do terrible things. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, once called it the banality of evil.
To take another example throughout history of a very different sort, if we look at Cambodia in the 1970s, here was a gentle, kind sweet people. They got new leadership, highly educated leadership, and they gave us one of the worst nightmares that history has ever seen akin to the Holocaust calling the killing fields. This is the logic of war. It's the logic of psychic numbing. It's the logic of which absent corrective mechanisms in institutions and societies, this sort of thing happens.
The military's awareness
MARGARET WARNER: So Col. Grossman, you've taught at West Point . How conscious is U.S. Military leadership in general of this potential and what do you... what do they do to try to train and teach young soldiers to be to resist this sort of sick culture that can develop?
LT. COL. DAVE GROSSMAN (Ret.): Ever since Mylai, every single soldier is required by law to be repeatedly trained on a yearly basis about what is an illegal act, what is an illegal action and not just how to identify illegal actions but how to go about reporting them and how to disobey orders.
This is the first time in human history that an army has been taught to disobey certain orders. The potential for atrocity, all of my fellow speakers tremendously imminent individuals, keep speaking of war as a situation which by definition has these problems. But the reality is that it has the potential for these problems.
The goal has to be a consistent systemic process at every level. The individual must be held accountable. The leaders who were immediately responsible must be held accountable. The individuals who were responsible for establishing the framework must be held accountable.
The overall dynamic is that American reputation-- I talk in my book on killing about an individual sending a letter. He was interviewing German soldiers in World War II. He said soldier after soldier said they were told by their uncles, their grandfathers, people who had experience in World War I, be brave, get in the front lines and surrender to the first American you see. The American reputation for decency in World War I saved untold thousands of lives in World War II. That's what we must struggle to maintain in a systematic process of making sure that at the individual level, the leadership level that there will not be breakdowns like this. The reality is they're extraordinarily rare and they must be made even more rare.
(continued)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/prisoners_5-11.html
and so it goes...
Kis
I couldn't copy the entire transcript, so after an attempt to do some editing, I've included the link to the site.
May 11, 2004
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba has accused soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison of "incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses." Experts examine the psychology of abusive behavior.
MARGARET WARNER: Americans have been shocked by photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. military guards. The degrading treatment of the detainees is horrifying. So, too, has been the apparent attitude of the guards.
In one photo, a female soldier grins as she points to several naked, hooded men. In another, two smiling guards give the thumbs-up sign as they pose with a pile of naked prisoners.
Political leaders from President Bush on down expressed disgust and a conviction that the behavior shown was a gross aberration for U.S. soldiers and for all Americans.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: What took place in that prison does not represent America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom. I keep repeating, but it's true. It doesn't reflect how we think. This is not America. America's a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect.
MARGARET WARNER: But the hometown paper for the military police company involved, the Cumberland, Md. "Times-News" had a different take in an editorial Sunday.
"Visiting journalists search in vain," the paper said, "for some dark local element that gave birth to the monstrous actions in Abu Ghraib. We are America, for better and worse."
The psychology behind abusive behavior
MARGARET WARNER: And for more on the psychology behind abusive behavior like this, we turn to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who's studied Nazi doctors and Vietnam veterans among others.
His latest book on violence is called "Superpower Syndrome." Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a retired psychology professor at West Point. His new book is "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill" Jay Winik, a professor and war historian, and author of "April 1865: The Month That Saved America."
And Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University. In 1971, he conducted a landmark study in which two dozen college students were directed to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated jail with disturbing results. Welcome to you all.
And Professor Lifton, let me begin with you. Why do apparently ordinary people commit brutal acts like this?
DR. ROBERT JAY LIFTON: I would understand it as what I call an atrocity- producing situation. In studying Vietnam and what happened there and interviewing Vietnam veterans I found that the situation they were in was so structured psychologically and militarily that ordinary people, no better or worse than you or me, could walk into it and commit atrocities.
And I think as different as Iraq is, we have a parallel situation of a counterinsurgency war with great confusion as to who the enemy is and difficulty in tracking him down or identifying him, enormous fear and frustration and hostility from the population, and this creates a group process rather than any kind of individual aberration, a group process of atrocity.
It works from many levels because as we've heard there are sometimes instructions given from those in charge of interrogation, people from military intelligence, or sometimes there's just a kind of indirect suggestion that softening up processes can be tough and abusive.
And then there's still a higher level of high-ranking officers and war planners who demand information from interrogations and apply pressure on those military intelligence officers. So here you have a three-tier dynamic and the foot soldiers, the MPs and the civilian contractors are caught in this atrocity-producing situation. They adapt to the group and they join in.
Potential for brutality in anyone?
MARGARET WARNER: And, of course we don't know the actual situation in this case because that will remain for further hearings and the court's martial but let me ask Professor Zimbardo, your own studies, your own research, do you agree that there's the potential for if not atrocity certainly brutality in just about anyone and if so what triggers it?
PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO: Well I agree with everything my colleague, Robert Jay Lifton, said. Human nature has the potential to be good or evil. It depends entirely on the situation around us. These young men and women who are being scapegoated, being rushed to trial, rushed to judgment, were embedded in an evil barrel.
What happened is, in my study, we took good young then... men, put the them in an evil barrel of a simulated prison and out came corrupted young men who did sadistic acts very similar to what you see in Abu Ghraib, chaining them, making them naked, putting bags over their heads, making them clean out toilet bowls with their hands and at the end simulating sodomy, having the prisoners simulate sodomy. And these were college students to other college students.
MARGARET WARNER: What drove that? I mean did you ask them?
PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO: No, no. Just the opposite. I was a superintendent of the prison who said no physical violence but they waited until I went to sleep because for a variety reasons. First of all, prison situations are one of enormous power differentials. Guards have total power over prisoners who have no power. Unless there's strict leadership, unless there's clear leadership that prevents the abuse of power, that power will seep out. That power, that sadistic impulse will dominate. That's what we saw in our prison. That's what you see in Abu Ghraib.
My sense is that these young men and women are certainly not... certainly didn't go in as bad apples -- just as in our prison they went in as good American soldiers. They've come out shamed. Their future is destroyed. What happens is what the system is doing is taking the blame away from those who created the barrel.
All of those who should have been in command, all of those who should have been in charge, the military intelligence that clearly, clearly influence, suggested, push, enhanced the use of these terrible tactics. But all of... the system wants to be preserved. That's why we're rushing to judgment to these young men and women.
MARGARET WARNER: Jay Winik, let's broaden it out even further from the United States. What does history tell us about what triggers atrocities?
JAY WINIK: Right. What history tells us is that there's just a terrible logic of war where ordinary or even extraordinary people can just do terrible things. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, once called it the banality of evil.
To take another example throughout history of a very different sort, if we look at Cambodia in the 1970s, here was a gentle, kind sweet people. They got new leadership, highly educated leadership, and they gave us one of the worst nightmares that history has ever seen akin to the Holocaust calling the killing fields. This is the logic of war. It's the logic of psychic numbing. It's the logic of which absent corrective mechanisms in institutions and societies, this sort of thing happens.
The military's awareness
MARGARET WARNER: So Col. Grossman, you've taught at West Point . How conscious is U.S. Military leadership in general of this potential and what do you... what do they do to try to train and teach young soldiers to be to resist this sort of sick culture that can develop?
LT. COL. DAVE GROSSMAN (Ret.): Ever since Mylai, every single soldier is required by law to be repeatedly trained on a yearly basis about what is an illegal act, what is an illegal action and not just how to identify illegal actions but how to go about reporting them and how to disobey orders.
This is the first time in human history that an army has been taught to disobey certain orders. The potential for atrocity, all of my fellow speakers tremendously imminent individuals, keep speaking of war as a situation which by definition has these problems. But the reality is that it has the potential for these problems.
The goal has to be a consistent systemic process at every level. The individual must be held accountable. The leaders who were immediately responsible must be held accountable. The individuals who were responsible for establishing the framework must be held accountable.
The overall dynamic is that American reputation-- I talk in my book on killing about an individual sending a letter. He was interviewing German soldiers in World War II. He said soldier after soldier said they were told by their uncles, their grandfathers, people who had experience in World War I, be brave, get in the front lines and surrender to the first American you see. The American reputation for decency in World War I saved untold thousands of lives in World War II. That's what we must struggle to maintain in a systematic process of making sure that at the individual level, the leadership level that there will not be breakdowns like this. The reality is they're extraordinarily rare and they must be made even more rare.
(continued)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june04/prisoners_5-11.html
and so it goes...
Kis
