Daily Archives: May 16, 2004

3 posts

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib

[ Below are excerpts from the latest Seymour Hersh article on Abu Ghraib. –BL ] by SEYMOUR M. HERSH 15 May 2004 | The New Yorker (May 24 issue) …. The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic. The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guant?namo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in […]

Situationist Ethics: The Stanford Prison Experiment doesn’t explain Abu Ghraib

[ This Saletan piece follows up an earlier one addressing the Stanford Prison Experiment. Saletan points out dynamics other than the guard-prisoner social structure that account for the Abu Ghraib abuses. Thanks to Alexandra Dadlez for the forward. –BL ] by William Saletan May 12, 2004 | Slate Are the American soldiers who abused Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison “a few who have betrayed our values,” as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims? Or are they victims of a prison system guaranteed to produce atrocities? In recent days, the latter view has taken hold, buttressed by the Stanford Prison Experiment, a […]

A systematic process learned from Cold War

[ From the article: “The idea of [abuses at Abu Ghraib] being ‘a few bad apples’ won’t wash. It looks increasingly like a systematic process. And there have clearly been conscious attempts by psychologists to make the techniques culturally relative to a Muslim population,” [Sherman Carroll of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in London] added, referring to reports of enforced nakedness, the simulation of oral sex, forced masturbation and naked human pyramids which seemed calculated particularly to offend followers of Islam. –BL ] by Paul Vallely 14 May 2004 | The Independent