Fixing Hell (11 page)

Prisoner counts became hour-long ordeals in which guards tormented the prisoners with forced exercise. The prison became filthy, with guards often denying bathroom rights to the prisoners. Prisoners sometimes had to clean toilets with bare hands, and guards would remove mattresses from cellblocks as a form of punishment or harassment. Some guards also inflicted forced nudity and sexual humiliation on their charges, The Lucifer Effect recounts. A rumor of a planned escape attempt on the fourth day prompted Zimbardo and the guards to try moving the prisoners to a more secure facility—the real Palo Alto police station jail. When the police department refused, Zimbardo could not understand why his law enforcement “colleagues” would not help him with the escape problem. Still deeply absorbed in his role as “superintendent” of the prison, Zimbardo reacted with anger and disgust at the lack of professional cooperation between his prison and the police jail.

As the experiment proceeded, several guards became progressively sadistic. But interestingly, the prisoners had taken to their prescribed roles just as seriously. During the experiment some prisoners were offered “parole”—release from the prison—on the condition that they forfeit all of their experiment participation pay. But when Superintendent Zimbardo denied their parole applications, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Theoretically, any prisoner could have said “To hell with this!” and walked out of the experiment at any time, Zimbardo told me. But he admitted that, as the experiment actually played out, walking away was not a simple proposition—not in a physical sense and certainly not in terms of the psychological effect on the prisoners.

Zimbardo explained that he thought the subjects continued participating because they had internalized the prisoner identity. Amazingly, this fake prison scenario had very quickly created a prisoner mentality for them. They considered themselves prisoners, and prisoners stay in prison. So they did not leave even though they could have.

But the prisoners were not entirely compliant. In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo describes how one prisoner, Number 416, went on a hunger strike in an attempt to force his release—again, trying to force the release of his prisoner persona, since in theory the experiment participant could have quit at any time. The guards responded by forcing the man to stay in a small closet and hold the meal he refused to eat. After three hours, the guards left the man’s fate up to the other prisoners. If they would give up blankets, the man would be let out of the closet. If not, Number 416 would stay in solitary confinement overnight. The other prisoners ostracized Number 416 and all but one kept their blankets.

With the abuse continuing to spiral out of control, Christina Maslach, one of Zimbardo’s graduate students, was allowed into the prison for the first time to interview the participants. She was appalled by what she found and strongly advised Zimbardo that the experiment had crossed a line. She told him that what he was doing was harmful to the students, possibly unethical, and must be ended immediately. Finally able to pull himself out of the scenario and see it with more objective eyes, Zimbardo agreed that his graduate student was correct. After only six days instead of the planned fourteen, the Stanford Prison Experiment was shut down. In the years since, it has been cited as a classic demonstration of the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support, plus the power of authority. Hundreds of papers have been published dissecting the Stanford Prison Experiment.

One of the key revelations from the experiment was that the situation caused the participants’ behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. The “guards” weren’t sadistic bastards who seized on the opportunity to abuse others, and the “prisoners” weren’t submissive weaklings predisposed to accept their abuse. In both groups, they were normal young men turned into those personas by the situation.

I asked Zimbardo questions about the oversight and the basic level of controls, and the checks and balances for the study. The first major failing was that Zimbardo assigned himself the role as the prison superintendent. This meant that he was supposed to be the overall director of the study and at the same time serve as the head of the simulated prison—supervising the role-playing while also role-playing himself. He admitted that this was a problem. As the director of the study and head researcher he was supposed to be sort of a third party, a detached, objective observer. He admitted that by being a participant he became blinded and missed some of the problems that occurred early on. Another problem was that there was no medical monitor with expertise in the effects of sleep deprivation and food deprivation upon the prisoners. That made me think that having physicians assigned to work for me at Abu Ghraib would help ensure safety at all times. We would need medical experts to monitor the welfare of the detainees who were being interrogated.

Zimbardo went on to talk about the vagueness of the instructions that he gave to the guards, and it was clear that this became a major problem within a matter of days.

“When I told them not to physically harm the prisoners, I thought I was setting some limits. It turned out that my instructions should have been much more explicit,” he said.

I remarked on how, no matter how much I study the Stanford experience and similar experiments on human behavior, it’s hard to accept how normal people, good people, can be driven to inhumane treatment of one another under certain conditions. Zimbardo told me the idea chills him also, and he probably knows the truth of that more than any other professional in this field.

“About a third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. And most of the guards were disappointed when the experiment concluded early,” he said. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it? And it’s not just the participants either. Out of more than fifty outside persons who saw the prison, who actually saw what was going on inside and how things had gotten out of control, Maslach was the only one who questioned the morality of the whole thing.”

Zimbardo emphasized to me that the rules and policies for what should and should not happen must be made clear, and that there has to be firm and constant oversight from the leadership at all prisons. Moreover, he went on to explain that the living conditions, the overall environment, could have been important in steering guards toward abuse.

“You have to look at how these people are living. When you live in a hellhole, your mind is going to go in that direction too,” he said. “Perhaps the generals and colonels and senior leaders may have never told anyone to torture a prisoner, but if this Abu Ghraib is as horrible an environment as I’ve heard, the living conditions and the tacit approval of higher-ups may have combined to set the conditions for what occurred there.”

We marveled at how the human mind could jump the rails so quickly and with such intensity. After a while we moved on to talking about the Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, during the Civil War, a sort of precursor to Abu Ghraib in which Americans held other Americans in the worst conditions. As noted in
Battle Cry of Freedom
by James M. McPherson, Andersonville was the most notorious of all Civil War prisons, hastily constructed in early 1864 in southwest Georgia to corral the growing number of Union soldiers taken prisoner. Built to accommodate up to 10,000 captured soldiers, it was soon jammed with over 32,000. The open-air stockade with twenty-foot-high log walls was a horrible place. A stagnant stream named Sweet Water Branch ran through the camp and prisoners were forced to use it as a sewer as well as for drinking and bathing.

Prisoners were forbidden to construct shelters, and most had to survive while fully exposed to the elements. Prisoners starved on a diet of rancid grain and mealy beans or peas. Sickness often was a certain road to death, as there was no medical care, McPherson explains. During the summer, more than a hundred prisoners died every day, while others were killed by marauders among their own ranks. More than 30 percent of the 45,000 who entered Andersonville never came out alive. The Union had similar prison camps, including one in Elmira, New York, where the death rate approached Andersonville’s, despite the North being much better equipped to cope with captured soldiers.

After the war, the North accused the Confederacy of deliberately abusing Union prisoners at Andersonville, and the prison’s commander, Captain Henry Wirz, was hanged in November 1865. His crime was cited as “impairing the health and destroying the lives of prisoners.”

Abu Ghraib was not unique, Zimbardo and I agreed. We knew we could take lessons from the past and apply them to this current problem. We agreed that underlying the overall problem was a leadership failure. By not putting procedures in place to prevent these abuses, they were inevitable once Abu Ghraib received the very first prisoner. Not only had this occurred at Abu Ghraib and Andersonville, but it had also happened in many other prisons around the world when the proper procedures were not put into place. In Brazil, for instance, the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s used its prisons to torture those who spoke out against the government. We began to reflect back on my work at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. My staff and I wrote standard operating procedures (SOPs) and briefed many leaders on how to do this right. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Cuba during my time there, as did other senior leaders. The system had the knowledge of how to do it right, how to manage prisoners without resorting to the abuses we saw at Gitmo.

We already fixed this, I kept thinking. Why the hell is it happening all over again?

The more we talked it over, the more Zimbardo and I arrived at the same conclusion. Clearly, the leaders at the highest levels never thought that we would be in Iraq for more than three to six months so there was no need to prepare and establish a proper prison system. All my guidance was there in black and white, ready to be implemented, but the head honchos must have figured we were just going to be in and out of Iraq in a flash, so why bother?

We finished our breakfast and I finished my notes. Zimbardo gave me a big hug and I told him that I’d keep in touch with him as best I could while I was at Abu Ghraib. We tentatively set plans to meet again at the upcoming American Psychological Association convention that was to be held in August 2004, in Honolulu. I told him if I was able to attend the conference, I would like to sit down with him again and compare notes about my experience.

My talk with Zimbardo reaffirmed that no amount of professional discourse with another psychologist can make some things clear. You may understand it in some intellectual sense as a medical professional, but you still have to deal with it as a human being. As I headed back to my car I couldn’t help but ask myself,
How could any American soldier do that? How could the environment be so bad that it would lead any red-blooded American soldier to do the things that I saw in those horrible pictures of naked dog piles and prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib?

I knew that I could not answer these questions yet, that I would have to wait until I arrived at Abu Ghraib. The trip would be long and exhausting, taking eight days in all. First I would fly from Honolulu to San Francisco, then to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for some additional briefing, then on to Germany, Kuwait City, and finally to Abu Ghraib.

I went back to our temporary hotel room at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, picked up my wife, and headed for the beach at Bellows Air Force Station—a gorgeous area that is accessible only to military personnel and their guests. Janet and I had spent many days there, alone and with our son and granddaughter. It was a place that always brought me immense peace and satisfaction. But on this day, as I lay on that sandy beach, staring up at that beautiful blue Hawaiian sky, I couldn’t stop asking myself the same thing, over and over.
How could any American soldier torture another living human being?

I did my best to focus on enjoying the time with my family, but I was busy preparing for my trip to Abu Ghraib. Within days of my seeing Zimbardo, a package arrived in the mail. He had had his staff mail me a copy of a DVD entitled Quiet Rage, the definitive video account of the Stanford Prison Experiment, with extensive footage taken during the experiment and commentary from Zimbardo and others. I was glad to have it in hand because, like most psychologists, I had read about the experiment in graduate school but had never seen the video.

Within a week, I was wheels up and en route to Iraq. All told, it would take about twenty-seven hours in the air for me to arrive at Camp Victory, Iraq, the headquarters of the U.S. forces. I flew to Fort Bragg and then to Kuwait—on commercial flights, thank God. Military flights lacked the comforts of even the most budget-conscious commercial airlines. Soldiers flying with heavy loads and all sorts of gear made them even less comfortable. Plus, even when I flew in civilian clothes on military flights, the young soldiers still knew that I was an officer. That usually wasn’t a problem, but for this flight I needed anonymity and solitude to have a well-crafted plan in place by the time my wheels touched down.

Once my United Airlines plane was en route to the West Coast, I popped in Zimbardo’s Quiet Rage DVD in my laptop and watched it several times on the five-hour flight from Honolulu to San Francisco. When I got off the plane in San Francisco I had a good three-hour layover, so I headed for the USO lounge because I knew that I would find comfort and friendship being around other soldiers and sailors. There was only one empty seat available in the lounge, so I put my gear down and sat in the soft brown leather chair. I was expecting to just drift away for a nap. But after a few minutes, I overheard a soldier talking with his wife on a cell phone. I glanced over in his direction and saw a big beefy soldier hunched over, elbows on his knees, phone pressed to his ear. This tall, bald-headed kid, who must have been 230 pounds of muscle mass, was crying like a baby. Overhearing bits and pieces of the conversation, I ascertained that he was struggling with the death of his father. When he got off the phone, I gave him a moment to regain his composure, and then I walked over to him. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder as I spoke.