|
Originally Posted by Stan Goff
In 1971, Stanford University Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo designed an experiment that would come to be known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Subjects were recruited and paid a modest stipend, whereupon they were separated into “prisoners” and “guards,” and placed in a mock prison built in a Stanford basement. The prisoners were stripped, deloused, shackled, and placed in prison clothes, while the guards were given authoritative uniforms, sunglasses, and batons. Long story short – within two days there was a near prison riot, psychosomatic illness began to break out, white middle-class kids in the role of guards became rapidly and progressively more sadistic and arbitrary, and the two-week experiment had to be abandoned after only six days… before someone was badly hurt or killed.
The experiment seemed to support the truism that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But that conclusion serves as a description, not an explanation. It describes what happens to the individual, but it fails to account for the role of rationalization that legitimates the domination, and it completely fails to account for institutional support of that domination.
When one uses the term “systemic,” she is saying that the source of this abuse is not individual moral failure, but a predictable expression of the system and its structures.
The abuses of detainees, by US troops, by CACI International and Titan Corporation mercenaries, and by the CIA in Iraq, was “systemic.”
...
We are being asked to believe that:
(1) The only abuse that occurred against anyone detained by American forces in Iraq was photographed and reported.
(2) No abuses occurred anywhere that were not photographed or reported.
(3) The one percent of US troops who are the “bad apples” all happen to serve together in the same unit… the unit that is the only one guilty, and that happened to get caught because of the photographs.
(4) The aggressive investigation now being proclaimed by everyone from George W. Bush to CENTCOM, about abuses that were already on record in the military (an internal investigation had already been launched in February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was kept from the public), would have happened had the photographs and story not been aired on national television.
(5) The military was not attempting to cover up their own investigation, and that they would have informed the public of these abuses even had Seymour Hersh not put the whole miserable episode into print.
(6) The military did not cover anything up in the two weeks between the time CBS warned them that they were going to air an expose and when they actually did air it.
(7) No one in the chain of command above Brigadier General Janis Karpinski is responsible for the failure to halt these abuses, even though Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez was informed of the investigation of these abuses, complete with sworn statements and photographs, by General Taguba last February.
Other abuses and violations of the Geneva Conventions and Laws of Warfare are already on record, some with videos available on the web, such as:
(1) Shooting people who are clearly not armed and who are engaged in no threatening behavior.
(2) Shooting into ambulances.
(3) Shooting wounded people who are not armed.
(4) Shooting wounded people who are obviously no longer capable of fighting.
(5) Shooting into crowds.
There has never been a Stanford Military Occupation Experiment to complement the Stanford Prison Experiment, unless we just count the military occupations themselves. There is a structured, systemic antagonism between an occupying military and the people whose land they occupy. And there will be no investigations of any of it, because there never are, unless and until the American public is confronted with them.
The National Command Authority and its cheerleaders cannot say out loud… this is what we are doing, and it can’t get done unless we dehumanize the occupied. This reality, this system, will express itself in the thoughts and emotions of you, the troops who carry it out, because this military occupation is in a sense making a prison of Iraq and making you, the troops, its turnkeys.
It will only be those exceptional individuals in the military who refuse to surrender their humanity – no matter how little they may understand the big picture – and who will witness. Those who do break with the system and witness are very important people, important to history, because their refusal to surrender your own moral integrity to the system may lead to our collective salvation by ending this felonious occupation. The troops who filed reports about the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were such exceptions.
So were Tom Glen and Ron Ridenhour.
What these images of the Abu Ghraib humiliation and torture have done in the United States is collide with the “exalted image and the pseudo-event” of the Bush propaganda apparatus, just as the images of the My Lai massacre did in 1969. That collision between the reality and the real image of war startles civilians here in the La-La Land of wide screen TV and suburban SUV’s, and it shakes them out of their opiated shopper dream-state.
|