Abu Ghraib, Mi Lai, etc. ...
by Charles C. Hall, Ed.D

"Tis too much proved that ... with pious action we do suger o'er the devil himself." -Wm. Shakespeare

"I am a Shite. My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam's regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam's feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them." -- "Ali," age 32, a Baghdad resident. Dallas Morning News, 07-22-07.

In one of his plays, Shakespeare wrote, " ... the air is most foul in Denmark." In the current state of affairs, in some climes, the air is yet most foul.

I was not surprised when the photos from Abu Ghraib prison appeared in news magazines and on the toob. I was shocked and dismayed, but not at all surprised. Why? Because I had seen it all before. Does the small Vietnamese village of Mi Lai ring a bell? There, over four hundred old men, women, children, and babies were slaughtered in rice paddies, homes and ditches by an Army platoon commanded by 1st Lt. Wm. Colley. He was the only person charged with the massacre, even though at trial, it was obvious that his tacit orders issued from his superiors.

One of the soldiers in Colley's platoon was featured in a 60 Minutes piece some years ago. The Veterans Administration provides him some fifteen to twenty different needs for his PTSD. He was sitting in his usual chair one day staring at a photo of his young son. Several days, weeks, months before, there was a disturbance in his yard in which his son was killed by gunfire. At the moment of his son's death, the glass of the frame of his son's photo shattered. He stares at his son's photo endlessly. He never looked toward the camera nor the reporter during the piece. His right leg shook relentlessly.

In the program, he said he was ordered to kill a woman who was fleeing. He fired into her back. When he walked over to determine if she was dead, he found that she was carrying an infant in her arms. The round penetrated both, killing them instantly from a mere few feet away.

Such tragedies cannot be rationalized by the "fog of war," nor "collateral damge" excuse. This was a mass murder of innocents. This man in the program relives the entire scene of some thirty, forty years ago, every minute of every day. One may accurately say that he is a prisoner of his conscience. I have been told that there were other similar acts of mass murder in that senseless war, a war fostered by the unfounded fear of communism.

I do not believe the United States has recovered from the shameless days of McCarthyism and Nixonism. No question. I was totally against that war when it began to be a topic of daily news. Few of us knew in `65, `66 that it really had its roots with Truman, then Eisenhower, then Kennedy. After Kennedy, the big man from Texas, who had done so much for the American people, fell into the trap of his own arrogance, fear and blindness. He sumarily discounted any arguments by the few voices who saw the quagmire early on. Insular corruption by Diem, his brother and brother's wife did not bode well as trustworthy partners for the U.S. Is the same "partnership " in Iraq similar? Do we not have rampant corruption there? Eleven billion dollars of your and my money gone missing?

Today in Iraq, we hear of some of the gregarious acts of murder and rape. There is one story that is particularly troubling to me. A father and his eight-year-old son were swept up in a raid and wound up in Ahu Ghraib. The father was humiliated, his manhood degraded in several ways, one of which was he was forced to wear a pair of women's panties. The eight-year-old was forced to watch his own father suffer extreme humiliation. Is this torture, or am I just being picky? It's torture.

The manner by which Abu Ghraib is being run is not a surprise to me at all. As I wrote above, I have seen it all before. When I was a graduate student, I came across a study in which a project was carried out at a large university. About fifty students were given numbers. The "evens" were required to shock the "odds" with a mild to severe electrical stimulus. What became clear to the psychologists was that the "evens" continued to shock the "odds" even when they knew they were inflicting pain.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo had the same reaction to the Abu Ghraib photos as I did. Dr. Z (as he is known) is a social psychologist at Stanford University. Thirty years ago in his lab he randomly assigned college students as "guards" or "prisoners" in a mock prison environment. As he watched the generals and politicians blame a few "bad apples" for the prisoner abuse, he knew different. Dr. Z states "Social psychologists like myself have been trying to correct the belief that evil is located only in the disposition of the individual and that the problem is in a few `bad apples.'" He wrote a book titled The Lucifer Effect in which a "transformation of character leads ordinary people to do extraordinarily evil things." *

Dr. Z states, " ... most of the evil in the world is not committed by a few bad apples. Why not assume that these are good apples in a bad barrel, rather than bad apples in a good barrel?" Dr. Z knew his student subjects were good apples since he gave each a battery of psychological tests, and every one checked out normal. "So, on day one they were all good apples. Yet within days the guards were transformed into sadistic thugs and the prisoners were emotionlly broken," Dr. Z said.

The behavorial expression of good and evil depends on the sitiation and whether we choose to act in a particular manner. " ... the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, " states Dr. Z. In several instances while an officer in the Army, I was able to keep soldiers from becoming bad apples by the leadership I demonstrated. Some were on the verge. A few calm words by myself averted their doing something I knew they would regret years later.

To have a good Army, prison, so forth and so on, it takes sensible and humane leadership. Everything, sometimes, depends on leadership.

So it goes . . . . *Shermer, Michael, Scientific American, Aug. 2007, pp 34-36.