Fixing Hell
Foreword copyright © 2008 by Philip Zimbardo
Copyright © 2008 by Larry C. James
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Grand Central Publishing
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First eBook Edition: September 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-53787-2
Contents
Foreword by Dr. Philip Zimbardo
10: Fighting the Terrorist Mind
U.S. Military Prisons: A Timeline
This book is dedicated to the soldiers we’ve lost in the global war on terrorism.
Note to the reader: Due to the sensitivities of the subject matter of this book, I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of some of the people in this story, including that of my wife and some of the military individuals involved. I have also altered names, locations, and military unit numbers to provide confidentiality to service members while telling this story. However, the names of several military personnel, including Colonel Morgan Banks and General Geoffrey Miller, have not been changed, as the public is already aware of their roles in the events that follow.
I
was asked to write the foreword to this remarkable book for two reasons: first, Colonel Larry C. James is a respected colleague and personal friend; and second, we have both witnessed how deeply the human mind can descend into depravity.
In 1971, I served as a superintendent of a prison with situations remarkably similar to those witnessed in the prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq: guards repeatedly stripping prisoners naked, bagging their heads, verbally abusing them, and finally, sexually degrading them. Only my prison was a relatively benign simulation in which guards and prisoners were all normal, healthy college students randomly assigned the roles of guards and prisoners. The Stanford Prison Experiment was projected to last two weeks but had to be terminated after only six days because it was running out of control. My efforts to identify the factors that can lead to prison abuse worked all too well, as my subjects and I all succumbed to circumstances that encouraged degeneracy. The experiment has been studied extensively ever since, considered a key to understanding how circumstances can drive normal people to acts of evil.
The parallels between these two prison settings so removed in time, place, and culture were highlighted in one of the Abu Ghraib investigations by a committee headed by James Schlesinger, former secretary of defense. It concluded that the “Landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military detention operations.” But it was not heeded, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib followed. The parallels have not been adequately explored until now; Larry James reframes the essential comparative question: “How did Zimbardo fuck it up?”
Answering that question helped my friend understand what went wrong in Abu Ghraib and that, in turn, helps us understand the bigger question about this war. In reflecting on what went wrong in America’s war against Iraq, Newsweek magazine’s Baghdad bureau chief highlighted one event. “What went wrong? A lot, but the biggest turning point was the Abu Ghraib scandal. Since April 2004, the liberation of Iraq has become a desperate exercise in damage control. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib alienated a broad swath of the Iraqi public. On top of that it didn’t work. There is no evidence that all the mistreatment and humiliation saved a single American life or led to the capture of any major terrorist, despite claims by the military that the prison produced ‘actionable intelligence.’”
The damning photos of American soldiers, men and women of the Military Police, seemingly enjoying their creatively sadistic abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners, mark a low point in our history as a nation, as well as an enduring shame for the military command and the Bush administration. Where were the safeguards against such cruelty that we expect from following the guidelines of the Geneva Conventions? How could it happen, particularly as enacted by supposed protectorates of the Leader of the Free World? Who is responsible for such outrageous behavior? Was it an isolated incident? Imagine our outrage at the reverse scenario, if Americans were depicted at the bottom of a pyramid of naked prisoners! Such vital moral, psychological, and political issues are why we all must care about the reasons for the digitally documented depravity that erupted in that strange prison in 2003.
While it is convenient to discharge our moral outrage by blaming it all on the random, impulsive actions of a few “rogue soldiers”—a few “bad apples,” as the military rushed to assert—it is not sufficient to merely acknowledge the Abu Ghraib abuses as yet another thing that somehow went wrong, as we do with media-exposed scandals in the nation’s police stations or of politicians. In this insightful book, Colonel James shows us how he came to terms with the complex questions of how American soldiers could commit such vile acts, and he shows us that there is not one simple answer. We all need to go on this quest for the deeper understanding of the whys and hows of such inhumane human behavior. If these were merely a few “bad apples,” then the solution would be simple: identify, prosecute, court martial, and imprison the culprits; voilà, problem is solved. However, suppose that these Army Reserve MPs were “good apples” when they were assigned to play their role as prison guards. Then something bad happened to them at that time, in that place, causing major character transformations. But what could make people who set out with noble intentions commit such depraved actions? What could make good people turn so evil so quickly? We want answers not only to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but also to find out how to change such “bad barrels” so they do not continue to corrupt good people. Punishing the evil doers—when situational and system forces are responsible for creating and maintaining those bad barrels—is like the Inquisition’s witch hunts as a cure for evil during the Middle Ages. Instead, we need to seek a public health model to discover the vectors of disease that induced suffering and moral affliction, so that it can be prevented in the future. Colonel James’s work provides a major step forward in this effort.
But why should we follow the path that our guide, Colonel James, has laid out for us? Why should we follow along on his quest to understand how such outrageous behavior could erupt in a military compound? Because he is in a unique position to guide us. Larry James is a colonel in the Army, with a long and distinguished career as an officer, but more importantly to me, as an innovative researcher and dedicated practicing psychologist. He not only understands individual mental problems that can be treated with psychotherapy and medication, but also social-situational problems that call for different kinds of intervention in modifying behavioral contexts. I have known Colonel James for many years as a colleague, meeting regularly at our profession’s conventions, reading his research, and corresponding with him about various issues, and I know that as one of the Army’s most seasoned psychologists and behavioral scientists, Colonel James has a particular appreciation of how external forces acting on individuals within groups can shape their behavior. Colonel James was the man we sent to fix hell, and we can learn from his experience.
As I read through his amazing book, I was fascinated by the depth of his personal involvement not only with understanding the causes and forces responsible for the Abu Ghraib abuses, but equally with his earlier efforts to change for the better the conditions of prisoner interrogation at the military’s Guantanamo Bay, “Gitmo,” facility. It was distressing to discover the psychic toll that these personal ventures into hellholes of human experience had on him. Within these pages, his PTSD symptoms are vividly depicted—without any macho minimizing of their impact on his sense of personal identity nor on his loving family. In reading his account, I couldn’t help but try to put myself in his shoes; after all, I too was close to experiencing these events up close. Larry had invited me to join him on his trip to Baghdad to establish new procedures designed to prevent any reoccurrence of such assaults on human dignity by U.S. soldiers in charge of inmates. Unlike Colonel James, I had a choice in the matter, and family pressures against going to such a dangerous war zone without adequate preparation made me decline. I still wish I had been there to learn firsthand about the conditions in that place, and I imagine my close social support might have lightened his mental toll. Not only did Colonel James put into place a set of explicit operational procedures that are a model for all correctional facilities, but before leaving the facility he insured that staff learned and practiced them faithfully. For that special service to his nation, Larry James was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
In one chapter, Colonel James describes the meeting we had in Hawaii just before he jetted to Baghdad. We discussed in detail the psychological forces that had been operating in my little basement prison, which transformed a bunch of kids, selected because they were really good apples, into very bad ones. On his way overseas, he then repeatedly viewed the video I had made of the study (Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment), and found the answers he sought. Those answers helped establish the necessary precautionary conditions to fix the hell of that horrific place. In Abu Ghraib, as in the Stanford Experiment, there was no detached observer and no systematic oversight, and there were no clear rules of engagement for prohibited and permitted behaviors. Not incidentally, the worst abuses in both prisons broke out on the night shift. It was then that the big cats were away, and so the mice could play at what one of the MP female guards described as “fun and games.”
As I tagged along with Larry James on his very personal, insight-filled journey relayed in this book, what I found most important was the revelation that none of those abuses need have occurred. Had the military system cared enough to create in advance the conditions that Colonel James outlined for them during his work at Guantanamo Bay, it is likely nothing sinister would have happened in Abu Ghraib. As Colonel James so ably relates, the importance of understanding situational and systemic forces that shape our thoughts, feelings, and actions must be at the core of a new appreciation of the dynamics of the human condition. Through the efforts and actions Colonel James describes in this book he helped resolve evil at this diabolical place—and hopefully in all U.S. military detention facilities.
Dr. Philip Zimbardo, author of
The Lucifer Effect:
Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment
Treat a man the way you want to be treated.
—R
EVEREND
J
OHNSON
Entering Hell
June 2004: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
F
or weeks I’d been unable to think about hardly anything but Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq that was rapidly becoming known for abuse and torture, with tales of American soldiers running amok. Since the moment my command told me I would be sent to this faraway prison to make things right, to bring some sanity back to an insane situation that was embarrassing the United States and crippling our efforts in the global war on terrorism, images from Abu Ghraib filled my mind during the day and haunted my dreams at night. The same images that were splashed all over the media back home—the Iraqi prisoners with hoods over their heads, stacked in a human pyramid, standing in stress positions with electrodes attached, or being taunted by military dogs—ran through my mind in an endless loop. And there were the classified details that didn’t make the evening news.
As I sat in the helicopter ferrying me right to the doorstep of this snake pit, the deafening rumble drowned out the rest of the world and I sat wondering if I was truly ready for what I was about to face. I’d seen plenty of challenges already in my career as an Army psychologist, some of it pretty ugly, but what was happening at Abu Ghraib was in a different class altogether. I closed my eyes and tried to relax amid the vibration and noise in the Black Hawk, but the horrors of Abu Ghraib played through my mind like a movie I couldn’t switch off. And this was only from reading the reports and seeing the pictures. I was about to step into this for real. I felt challenged but also heartened that I would be able to make this situation better, to bring the skills of both an Army officer and an experienced psychologist to bear on this crisis. My goal was to correct the abuses at this prison while preserving the U.S. military’s ability to hold and interrogate terrorists and Iraqi combatants. As an Army officer I supported the global war on terrorism and knew that military prisons and interrogations were necessary components of warfare, but as a psychologist I was compelled to prevent the abuse of prisoners in our custody. Drawing the line between aggressive interrogation and abuse was not always easy, and the task was deeply intertwined with my own internal conflicts about whether my first duty lay with being a soldier or a doctor. It was clear, however, that the line had been crossed in Abu Ghraib.