Fixing Hell (23 page)
I could see clearly the rage was beginning to stew up. The veins of his neck were bulging and his face was turning beet red. I knew that part of his rage was coming from the righteous indignation of a soldier who is proud of the men and women he serves with, and the finer points of the apple vs. barrel argument weren’t really sinking in with him. The barrel argument exonerates the soldiers, in a way, by saying that the bad actors were driven to what they did. But Frantz was hearing it as an accusation that any soldier would commit such acts when pushed. He vehemently disagreed. He leaned forward in his chair and looked me straight in the eyes. I could see the pupils in his green eyes dilate.
Frantz repeated, with real purpose this time, what the young, freckle-faced female MP had said. “Sir, she said, ‘You’re crazy. This is my dog, that’s an illegal order and you can’t make me do that shit. This is my dog and you ain’t gonna tell me to make him hurt anybody.’” He said it again, just to make sure I understood, and then he began to explain all over again that this was a quote of a young twenty-year-old female MP whom America had never heard of. This young MP was a K-9 dog handler during the abuse period from August to October 2003. One night, she was called to the cellblock where all the abuses commonly occurred and was ordered to have her dog be used in the torture tactics. She refused, then calmly stated the explanation that Ray had committed to memory. Then she calmly told her dog, “Let’s go,” and walked off the cellblock, never looking back.
“How come nobody knows about this stuff?” I asked.
“Sir, it’s because perhaps, you know, the good stuff never sells newspapers. Sir, the reality of it is most of the young soldiers here were trying to do the very best possible job that they could with little resources and crappy leadership. Heck, sir, eight of the 2,200 did a bunch of stupid shit. Now, Colonel, the way I figure, that means that 2,192 did the right stuff most of the time.”
This was the common thought of most soldiers that I talked to over and over about Abu Ghraib:
Yes, we had crappy leadership and worked in a shithole, but I wouldn’t have done what those eight knuckleheads did and neither would any of my buddies. There was something wrong with those eight people.
The average soldier walking down the street cannot imagine how any decent enlisted soldier or officer could ever torture another human being.
“Sir, not all soldiers at this place were immoral shitheads,” Ray said. “Eight. Out of 2,200.”
Many of my colleagues, such as Dr. Phil Zimbardo, disagreed and easily believed and asserted that it was the barrel that was bad and not the individual soldiers. I couldn’t support that position. I would argue that in any prison in America you’re going to find a small number of correctional officers who are impaired no matter how exceptional the prison facility and the leaders. The conditions at Abu Ghraib were the perfect storm whereby poor facilities, absent leaders, incompetence, depression, despair, fear, and hopelessness intersected and created a house of strange fathers. Whorehouses, alcoholism, sexual assault, and learned helplessness combined to fuel the moral demise at Abu Ghraib. I told Frantz that with my own eyes I could see that 99 percent of the soldiers were good, moral Americans who wanted to do the right thing but that all of their normal emotions were multiplied by fear and desperation, and left ungoverned by psychologically impaired leaders. The place became a cesspool in which people’s most base impulses could be given free rein. And still, only eight gave in to their most craven desires.
Lieutenant Colonel Frantz agreed up to a point, but he still resisted the idea that the environment had much influence, if any. He was not convinced that the problem was anything other than some bad soldiers running amok, so I began to share with him commonalities from other prisons such as what occurred at Andersonville during the Civil War. Lieutenant Colonel Frantz pointed out that we could not find any evidence of the abuse and torture being condoned by the U.S. government, because at Abu Ghraib it was not prison-wide but rather was limited to one or two cellblocks.
I had to agree that this was totally different, for instance, from the pervasive torture mandated by the Brazilian military government from 1964 to the early 1980s, when an abusive military regime sanctioned the use of abuse in prisons to manage its political opponents and stifle free speech. What I could gather was that a small number of soldiers were allowed at Abu Ghraib unfettered opportunity to abuse and torture prisoners as a result of vacant and incompetent leadership. At Abu Ghraib, moral disengagement was at times like a plague and was too often coupled with sharp change in normal behavior. Soldiers were so traumatized that they would begin to depersonalize, dehumanize, and psychologically and emotionally detach from their surroundings and do things that under normal circumstances they never would. Were the eight soldiers personally responsible for what they did? Yes, they were. Was there something wrong inside them, something immoral and pathological? Probably. But their demons might never have found their way to the surface if not for the terrible environment at Abu Ghraib, and they never would have had the opportunity to let those demons out if the leadership had been better.
I could see that Lieutenant Colonel Frantz was starting to see my point. He thought for a moment and then he tried to explain what it was like for the men and women at Abu Ghraib.
“Colonel, you have to remember, sir, we were getting the shit hammered out of us every damn day with mortars, rockets, and sniper fire. Sir, a big-ass mortar hit near and, man oh man, I was not myself for a while. It was like when Tom Hanks got blown off his feet in Saving Private Ryan. Colonel, remember at the end of the movie, the Germans were running over the town and Hanks got blasted by an incoming tank round? Sir, he was blown off his feet. Heck, even though he wasn’t directly hit, his whole world was in slow motion and he was not right for the rest of the battle. Well sir, that’s how it was for me. I had to deal with this place and at the same time I was in a mental daze all the time from the mortars.”
He sat there quietly for a moment, reflecting in his own memories about how stressful that was for him and his soldiers. As I said good night to Lieutenant Colonel Frantz, I wondered how many other soldiers were just like him, outwardly strong and capable, but dealing with terrible memories and a type of fear that never really lets go once it gets hold of you. Our conversation also left me pondering where I stood on this apple vs. barrel question. After our talk I realized more clearly than before that the apple vs. barrel argument represented the two extremes, and I was settling into a more finessed point of view about what caused the tragedy at Abu Ghraib. I knew that the environment and the lack of leadership were driving forces, and Frantz even agreed with me that those were key to understanding why those eight soldiers did the wrong thing. But if we acknowledge the effect of the environment and the lack of leadership, aren’t we buying into the barrel theory? Aren’t we saying that it was the situation that was all wrong and allowed those eight people to give in to their most craven desires? But if only eight of them went awry, when so many more could have done exactly the same thing, doesn’t that argue for the bad apple theory? I had to note the differences between this situation and the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which Dr. Zimbardo said the environment—the bad barrel—drove otherwise good kids to become abusive. In that situation, however, it was all the guards who went bad, not just some. At Abu Ghraib, it was eight out of thousands.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed an Alice in Wonderland question that could be twisted in infinite ways. Could we really say that the environment was so terrible but that thousands of soldiers had the strength and moral fiber to resist it anyway, while eight did not? Or was it more reasonable to say that no matter how horrible the environment, it was not the primary cause, that most of the blame fell on the eight individuals who committed the crimes?
There was no doubt in my mind that the environment, the barrel, was terrible. But I was also certain that the individual soldiers had some predisposition to this immoral behavior. I was beginning to wonder if we had taken eight questionable apples and thrown them in a bad barrel. How would the results be any different than what we were seeing in Abu Ghraib?
Fighting the Terrorist Mind
October 2004
K
affir! Kaffir!”
The detainee was shouting loudly and vigorously as Lieutenant Colonel Frantz and I walked by the razor fence line one afternoon.
“Did that bastard call me an infidel?” I asked Lieutenant Colonel Frantz, with mock indignation.
“That fucker sure did, sir,” he replied. “Just breaks my heart to know those fuckers don’t love us.”
Lieutenant Colonel Frantz’s dislike for the Iraqis was worn on his sleeve at all times. If you didn’t notice it, he would be proud to explain it to you. The screamed insult prompted him to wax poetic about the Iraqis.
“Colonel, I just don’t understand why we gotta be so nice to these bastards,” he said. His face got really red as he kept talking. “Sir, I don’t like their customs, and their language hurts my ears,” he said, starting in on his list. “It’s an ugly language. Man, it sounds like two guys are gagging when they talk.”
It was clear that not only were the religion, language, food, battle tactics, and culture of these extremists different, but so was their thought process.
Is it a normal thought process?
I would ask myself over and over. And if the terrorists’ mind-set is abnormal, what makes it abnormal? Is it a mental illness?
After making a detour to his office, Lieutenant Colonel Frantz and I headed to the chow hall for lunch. As we passed by the same part of the prison again, the same detainee saw us coming and yelled out “Kaaaaaaffirrrrrrr!!!!!” He was even louder this time and seemed to really be pissed. I stopped for a moment to hear what he said in broken English.
“I fuck you ass, I fuck you ass, you donkey, dog, dog, fuck you ass,” he screamed, while he grabbed between his legs and shook his crotch at me. Then, as he pointed directly at me, he yelled out, “PRAISE ALLAH!” Then he took his right hand and slowly made a cutting motion across his neck as though he was cutting my throat. “You die, you die, infidel, fucking dog, praise Allah,” were the last words he yelled. Then he spit on the ground toward me and walked away.
Stunned at the hate, the evil I saw in his eyes, I became even more convinced that this guy’s mind-set was similar to a Klansman at a segregation rally. He reminded me of the hate I saw in the eyes of many Klansmen as a young boy in Louisiana. Also, like the Klansman of old, no reason, no logic or amount of information could change this detainee’s mind nor clear his heart of the hate and evil he spewed. His rage was foul and almost inhuman.
After many encounters like that, it became clear to me that the new battlefield was not the sands of Iraq or Afghanistan, but the mind of terrorists.
Why? I asked myself. Why is the battlefield in these people’s minds now, in a way it never was before?
I concluded that this is an enemy like we have never faced before. We have waged wars in sand before, including World War II. The environment in Iraq is the same as the environment in North Africa or plenty of other places we fought in back then—it sucks. Mechanically, for example, the problems are the same. Sand in a tank engine in World War II destroyed it equally as well as it destroys a Humvee engine today. But the mind, language, culture, intent, and will of this enemy is totally different. Destroying the entire Western world is the goal some of them would die for. In wars of the past our enemies wanted to destroy our army, not American women and children walking down the street. They wanted to overtake our military, government, and society, and make us bow to their wills, but they didn’t have a fanatical insistence that each and every one of us be killed. This new enemy cannot be swayed to our way of thinking by showing them the finer points of American life. Too many Americans do not understand that this enemy in the global war on terror cannot be won over by tourism and Levi’s jeans, by “understanding them” and “respecting their culture.” Death to all Americans will be their only victory.
America has never fought an enemy like this, one that has been on this single-minded quest to eliminate all infidels for hundreds of years. Nor do we understand the level of hate and the almost delusional mind-set it takes to maintain a war for centuries. The jihad wars of the Middle East have been fueled by a religious fundamentalism that makes American fundamentalist right-wing anti-abortion hard-liners look like pussycats. As crazy as they might be sometimes, the nuts in the United States have not used suicide bombings as a strategy. No American has walked into a college student union, Madison Square Garden in New York City, or Union Station in Washington, D.C., and blown themselves up for a political cause, killing a hundred innocent other people at the same time. Our terrorist enemies have and will continue to do so on a regular basis in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and other parts of the world. I just pray they never employ the same strategy in the United States, that the tragedies of 9/11 will never be repeated in our shopping malls, parks, and schools. Our global war on terrorism is intended to stop exactly that nightmare from unfolding.
I asked myself many times,
Are these guys normal? Is this part of a mental illness or is it a normal part of their culture?
Well, clearly we know that 99.99 percent of all Muslims around the world are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. But that still leaves plenty of others who aren’t. After 9/11, when I was attending a conference in Chicago, I caught a ride in a taxi with a driver named Joe. Joe was a Ralph Kramden kind of a guy, with a big, loud, but likable persona. As I approached the cab, I could see Joe’s plaid shirt, baseball cap, and a bumper sticker that read, “I love this country.” Joe asked me, “Partner, what brings you to Chicago?”
“Man, I’m in town for a conference with some other psychologists,” I told him.