William Saletan: What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded — Slate
UK forces taught torture methods:
“The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.” —Guardian.UK
US approved sleep deprivation, nudity for Guantanamo inmates: report:
A Defense Dept. memo orders military personnel not to read or download the Taguba report on the grounds that it is classified. — Time
Dissension grows in senior military ranks on war policy:
If accountability for the prisoner torture goes no higher than the transgressors and their immediate superiors, we should not understand that to be because these soldiers were acting in an aberrant, “un-American” way, but exactly the contrary. There have always been atrocities in war; the demonization of the enemy and the dehumanization of nice American “kids next door” given almost unrestricted power are business as usual unless restrained by either a command and discipline structure or an innate moral sense, both of which have increasingly broken down. One commentator pointed out that the photographs and videos out of Abu Ghraib were essentially recreations of porn flicks, the highest-cashflow sector of the entertainment industry, loath as we are to admit it. And one caller to a radio talk show on the Abu Ghraib abuses reminded us that this sort of thing goes on routinely in domestic prisons as well as with alien ‘terrorist’ suspects abroad.
When confronted by monstrous acts, we often vacillate between seeing the perpetrators as clueless and seeing them as wanton. “My son was only following orders”, “they had not been trained in caring for prisoners”, “they were not provided with the Geneva Conventions to read”, “I didn’t read the Taguba report in detail”, “I didn’t learn about the abuses until I heard about it on TV”, “reservists should not be given the hard jobs to do”; vs. “these were the wrong people for the job”, “they must have had some innate sadistic tendencies”, “the guy who is the prison guard in domestic life was the ringleader”, etc. The transgressors were poorly led both from within and without themselves, and it is difficult to disentangle. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg described a trajectory of moral development and, while he was talking about individual psychology, it seems clear to me that as a society we have regressed from a moralistic to a legalistic stage of moral function where, increasingly, an innate sense of what is right is supplanted by a sense of what rules someone else has set up and whether we can violate them without being caught. Many are preoccupied with what the significance must be of the fact that these crimes were recorded in such detail. This is the first war in the age of ubiquitous personal digital media, but trophies of the kill, from the severed heads of slain enemies to Nazi uniform insignia, have always been collected triumphally. Thinking in terms of the stupidity in creating evidence or in allowing the evidence to get out only makes sense when you consider the problem from the vantage point of secrecy, lies and whether you will be caught doing what you are doing. I am more horrified that the bestiality of the acts was accompanied by the depravity of celebrating them with digital trophies.
The lesson we have to learn from this dilemma is that those who gravitate to power — from the grunts in the front lines of the armed forces to the halls of Washington (and the corporate boardrooms with the latter is increasingly interchangeable and intermingled) — embody the worst in all of us. As difficult to accept as is Goethe’s observation that “I have never heard of a crime that I could not imagine myself committing,” constraining this evil cannot occur until we embrace the potentiality within us rather than dismiss it as utterly alien. Individual psychological maturity also comprises in part integration — acknowledging and owning the unacceptable parts of ourselves, and so too maturity in national identity. The revelations of the abuses — and I reiterate my conviction that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg — give the lie to the naive faith in our celebrated social ideals of freedom and justice, which are these days largely empty propaganda spin by feckless and corrupt leaders. From the top down, embarking on a premise as monstrous as that upon which the invasion of Iraq was based leaves no choice but for the emergence of the monstrous in the participants.
There is another individual psychological mechanism which is at play in malevolent character pathology and which I think is relevant here on a national level. In projective identification, although it is very complex, you exxentially disown your own debased rageful impulses by ‘projecting’ them onto some external object, by whom you thus feel wronged or threatened. It is then safe to reciprocate with equivalent hostility and rage because you see it as reactive rather than proactive and, in so doing, preserve your sense of your own moral integrity. But the impulses, in the eyes of the outside observer, were yours all along, and you precipitated this convoluted maneuver to discharge them without reprobation, for fear of being seen or seeing yourself as the aggressor. And you can never master your own hostile urges with a more effeective, ‘mature’ defense mechanism as long as you continue to rely on projective identification.
