Fixing Hell (10 page)

I couldn’t get the classified version because 99.99 percent of all computers in military hospitals have unsecured computers and unsecured phone lines. Banks explained that I was a “by name” request from Major General Miller, my old boss in Gitmo, to deploy to Abu Ghraib to put procedures in place to fix these problems. Major General Miller had once said that I was the best operational psychologist in the Army and that he trusted me. This wasn’t a matter of me simply being named a good candidate; Major General Miller had specifically said I was the one person who could and should go fix this fuckup in Abu Ghraib. Twenty or thirty years earlier in my career, I would have relished being singled out for such an honor, but now I could only focus on the practical side of what it meant for me and my wife.

“Will you take the assignment, Larry?” Colonel Banks asked me. “You need to be there soon.”

“Of course, yes,” I said.

But I still was not getting the picture. My innocent thought was:
I’ll fly to Hawaii, and I’ll have three to six months to buy a home, get my wife settled, relax, and then go to Abu Ghraib.

Colonel Banks thanked me, we shook hands, and he asked me to give him a call when I arrived in Hawaii.

As soon as the official business with Colonel Banks was complete, I joined back up with my wife, and we visited the Smithsonian Asian Art and African American museums, just like any other couple enjoying a Sunday afternoon jaunt in downtown D.C. Military husbands and wives have a way of compartmentalizing worry, fear, and the normal emotions that paralyze most couples, so we spoke little about my conversation with Colonel Banks and what it would mean for us.

The next morning, Janet and I boarded a United Airlines plane out of Reagan National Airport to Honolulu and headed west for what we thought would be a needed break. We arrived in Honolulu late that Monday night and were greeted by our son and granddaughter and a close family friend at the airport. How I had longed over these long five years at Walter Reed to be with my son and my granddaughter again! My three-year-old granddaughter held a striking resemblance to my son. Her intense brown eyes, engaging laugh, affection for all living things around her, and energy would capture the hearts of many. We went to Anna Miller’s All Night Restaurant and had breakfast. My granddaughter sat on my lap the entire time and must have said my name fifty times. My son, as usual, lamented the many problems with his antique cars, spoke excitedly of his new job, and told us of the splendor of now being a college graduate. I couldn’t have been happier.

I reported for duty bright and early the next morning, May 11, at 7:30 a.m. I had no downtime to get my bearings, but that was okay. At least I was in Hawaii again. On the way to my office I met my secretary, whom I knew from my earlier work at the hospital, in the hallway. I expected to exchange some pleasantries. But instead she looked at me strangely.

“Colonel James, we’re surprised to see you,” she said. Her voice was tinged with an unusual seriousness, as if she were worried. “You’re not supposed to be here . . .”

“Ms. Judy, what on earth are you talking about?” I asked.

The look on her face was growing more and more serious. “Colonel, you have orders on your desk that say you should have been at a place in Iraq called Abu-something by yesterday. We thought you must be there already.”

The blood drained from my head. Awww shit . . . I stumbled into the office of the chief psychologist, the officer I came to Hawaii to replace, and demanded an explanation. “What in the heck is going on?”

Meeting my forceful language with his own, he replied, “Larry, you need to call Colonel Banks ASAP. All hell has broken loose up on the Hill with this Abu Ghraib thing and Congress wants it fixed now!!”

Dazed by the sudden acceleration, I could only think over and over how I had naively counted on three to six months before I headed down range to Iraq. I found a phone, called Colonel Banks, and informed him that I felt a tad misled.

“Morgan,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice light, “you have a new definition of the word ‘soon.’ You just talked with me yesterday about this.” He briefed me on the urgency, how the pressure on President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was mounting and the Army needed to send me there to put a plan in place posthaste. The colonel reminded me that, regardless of what either the president or Rumsfeld wanted, it was the right moral thing to put procedures in place quickly so that the abuses would never occur again. I couldn’t argue with that.

I made some phone calls to get more details. In between each call, I dialed my wife, but hung up before the call went through. This talk with my soul mate of thirty years needed to be in person. I realized that the loneliness of being away from her had already begun to haunt me deep in my soul.

My wife was a seasoned veteran of the madness of military life and I knew she would roll with this latest punch just as she had done many times in years past. But we both would later learn that this deployment would try and test both of our souls in ways we had never experienced before. As I walked into our hotel room, even before I spoke, she knew something was amiss. She saw an intense seriousness, perhaps the death stare all soldiers have in their eyes when they know their pending duties may be their last journey in life. She already knew I was going to this faraway, wretched place, but like me, she hadn’t realized it would come this soon. She also knew this deployment was different and the perils were greater. Unlike any previous field assignment, I was heading right into a hot combat zone where American servicemen and women were dying every day. Though we never spoke of this possibility, she knew that she might never see me again.

Yet, after I told her the news of the imminent deployment, she came through as strongly as I expected. It was like watching her change the tire on that little car again. She looked at me with determined eyes.

“Not a problem,” she said. “I’ll stay in the hotel for a few months until we close on a house. But Larry, there’s more we need to talk about. Mary was notified this morning that her Hawaii Army Reserve unit is deploying in June. That’s less than one month away.”

Mary was my son’s ex, the mother of our gorgeous three-year-old granddaughter. She was a personnel clerk in her reserve unit and her deployment meant that our granddaughter would be staying with us until Mary returned. Now that I was going to be away, that meant that my wife would be living in a hotel with our granddaughter. All of our furniture and the two cars were on a slow boat across the Pacific, and her entire social network was on the East Coast. Janet had so much on her shoulders, and yet she managed to stand tall.

Later that day, when I returned to my office, I received an e-mail from Dr. Philip Zimbardo saying he wanted to meet with me when he came to Honolulu to lecture at the University of Hawaii. Zimbardo was considered perhaps the most famous psychologist alive, best known for his studies on how good people turn evil—most notably demonstrated through his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. In this study, discussed in psychology classes throughout the world, he divided young men into prisoners and prison guards to demonstrate the powerful situational forces on individual behavior. Zimbardo found that even good people, when put into positions of authority under certain circumstances, can become abusive and lose all restraint. I had already been thinking that Zimbardo’s experiment, and what he learned from it, would prove useful in helping me fix what was wrong at Abu Ghraib. So his call, and his upcoming trip, turned out to be serendipitous. I needed to craft a plan in a hurry to stop the craziness as soon as my Black Hawk helicopter touched down at the Abu Ghraib compound. There was little time for literature searches and committees with my academic colleagues; both activities would occupy my time and would be futile efforts. I knew that Phil had lots of real-life information to share from his prison study. Hell, even he had gotten caught up in the madness of his experiment gone wrong, so he could speak from experience, not just as an observer. I needed to pick Zimbardo’s brain about what went wrong with his prison project, and how he would do the study differently to prevent abuses. Perhaps, I thought, this might help us down the road in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

Zimbardo came to town that very week. We met and discussed what went wrong in his study. From what I already knew of Abu Ghraib, the situation there seemed to have a lot in common with Zimbardo’s experiment. In both cases, what started as a legitimate, necessary endeavor—supposedly with controls in place to protect the participants—went very, very wrong. Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment when the college boys assigned to act as prison guards became abusive—and when he realized that in his role as the prison “superintendent” he was condoning it. Something similar was happening in Abu Ghraib, I suspected, and I needed Zimbardo to guide me in the right direction.

I met up with Zimbardo for breakfast early one morning at a sidewalk café right in the heart of downtown Waikiki, Honolulu. Phil and I ate pastries and drank strong Italian coffee while we discussed what he had heard about Abu Ghraib and the unclassified intel I knew about the situation.

The timing could not be more perfect,
I kept thinking.

Zimbardo, a tall, dark-haired, handsome man, had a gift for telling long stories filled with moral dilemmas and a concern for social justice, the same as myself. He had traveled the world many times over and had volumes of knowledge in his head about what had gone wrong at many prisons around the world. I was but a rookie compared to his skills. I wasn’t interested in the gory stories and the big picture of torture. Rather, I was curious about the early signs of abuse and how it would lead to outright torture. After some friendly chat to catch up with each other, I got right to it.

“Phil, tell me about your study at Stanford, your prison project. How did things get so fucked up so quickly?” I asked. I was searching for whatever I could to help me in my mission at Abu Ghraib.

In his Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, the goal was to assess the effects of prison life on normal young men. As described on Zimbardo’s Web site and in his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo and his team wanted to test the hypothesis that guards and prisoners tended to come to their roles with certain inherent traits that would promote poor prison conditions—in particular, the idea that people with sadistic tendencies gravitated toward jobs as prison guards. Zimbardo recruited students through a newspaper ad and paid them $15 a day ($75 in 2007 dollars).

All of the subjects selected for the study were normal in every way; they all came from good families, were well-educated and financially secure, and had no history of alcohol or drug abuse or psychological problems—this was key to what Zimbardo wanted to test. Anyone who had a history of psychological or drug problems was carefully screened out. Zimbardo emphasized to me that the selection of participants was very important.

“We wanted to make sure that no one could throw out the study by saying one bad thing about how we designed it because students in the sample had preexisting psychological problems,” he explained as we ordered more coffee. “So we excluded anyone in our study who had any hint of mental illness. Out of seventy-five applicants, we selected twenty-four.”

The “prison” was in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department in Palo Alto, California. Zimbardo explained that he had flipped a coin to randomly assign one group of young men to be prisoners and the other group to be prison guards.

With wooden batons, khaki uniforms, and mirrored sunglasses, the guards looked the part. While the guards could return home during off hours, many would later volunteer for added duty without additional pay. The prisoners wore muslin smocks with no underwear and rubber thong sandals, both chosen to be intentionally uncomfortable. Zimbardo explained that the uncomfortable clothing had a subtle but important effect, forcing the men to adopt “unfamiliar body postures” that helped to disorient and agitate them. They were referred to by assigned numbers instead of by name. These numbers were sewn on to their uniforms, and the prisoners were required to wear tight-fitting nylon pantyhose caps to the simulate shaven heads often found in prisons. A small chain around their ankles served as a symbolic reminder of their status.

Zimbardo briefed the guards before the experiment began and gave them only very simple instructions: no physical violence was permitted against prisoners. Other than that, it was up to them how to run the prison. Zimbardo also told the guards this:

“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy . . . . We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”

In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo explains how the “prisoners” were told to wait at home until the experiment began. Suddenly the Palo Alto Police Department, which was cooperating with Zimbardo at this point, showed up and “arrested” them. They were “charged” with armed robbery and after a full booking procedure by the police, including fingerprinting, having their mug shots taken, and listening to information regarding their Miranda rights, they were delivered to Zimbardo’s prison, where a strip-search and delousing awaited them.

The behavior of both the guards and prisoners was shocking. Zimbardo found that even though this was only a study simulating prison life, the guards inflicted extreme abuse upon the student prisoners—and the prisoners took it. The guards forced sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and simulated homosexual acts on the prisoners. They raged against the inmates, humiliated them any way they could, and used isolation cells.

It was clear that the student guards sought to break the prisoners’ wills and leave them with a sense of psychological hopelessness, as is common in real prisons. Zimbardo learned that even though none of the students had ever worked as prison guards before, within thirty-six hours of the study beginning, these “perfectly normal college boys,” as he frequently referred to them, began to demonstrate typical abusive behaviors documented in many prisons around the world. And as is seen in real prisons, the high level of stress progressively led the prisoners from rebellion to inhibition. Within days, many of them were completely submissive and showed severe emotional disturbances.