May 11, 2004

The Psychology of Torture; Past Incidents Show Abusers Think Ends Justify the Means

By Shankar Vedantam

The U.S. troops who abused Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were most likely not pathological sadists but ordinary people who felt they were doing the dirty work needed to win the war, experts in the history and psychology of torture say.

Torturers usually believe they are carrying out the will of their societies -- and feel betrayed when the public professes outrage after the abuses come to light, said a range of historians, activists and psychologists. This mentality has played out in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, in the conflict in Northern Ireland, during the Holocaust and within the Chicago Police Department.

"When torture takes place, people believe they are on the high moral ground, that the nation is under threat and they are the front line protecting the nation, and people will be grateful for what they are doing," said John Conroy, author of "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People," which examined torture in several settings.

What happened at Abu Ghraib, Conroy and other experts said, probably grew out of a shift in American priorities after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the subordination of human rights to victory in the war against terrorism.

Large numbers of Americans have asserted since the attacks that the war against terrorism is a new kind of battle that must be fought with new methods, including coercive techniques. Significant portions of the public in opinion polls, military strategists, law experts, and even ethicists and the clergy have endorsed using torture to gain information that could avert terrorist attacks.

Experts have justified torture based on pragmatism, military history and theories of a just war. But coercive measures should be reserved for extreme cases, these experts say, not the situation at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi detainees were not terrorist leaders.

Human rights activists said such arguments stand on a slippery slope: Once captors are given license to torture, the abuse of large numbers of prisoners usually becomes standard operating procedure.

"Since 9/11, the Defense Department has openly adopted stress and duress techniques," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "We have learned from the Army that there is a 72-point matrix of stress that the Pentagon has adopted to guide interrogators. It outlines different forms of coercion that can be applied. It includes everything from different amounts of sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation, to sensory overload, stripping, hooding, binding detainees in various positions -- essentially everything we have seen in these pictures short of the sexual humiliation."

The Bush administration has said U.S. forces do not use torture. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called the abusers "un-American" and asserted that the guards were acting on their own. But according to the military investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, guards said they were told to prepare Iraqis for interrogation, and military intelligence personnel commended the abusers for making detainees compliant.

One witness told a military investigation that interrogators had asked guards to "loosen this guy up for us." Another said the abuse was "to get these people to talk." A third said that male detainees "were made to wear female underwear, which I think was to somehow break them down."

While Americans have been shocked by the reports from Baghdad, one poll in October 2001 found that 45 percent of Americans were willing to use torture "if it were necessary to combat terrorism." Much of this support rested on hypothetical scenarios in which a terrorist had knowledge about an attack planned on the United States, and torture was seen as the only way to extract information that could save thousands of lives.

Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, a self-described pragmatist, said he believes the United States currently employs torture in some circumstances and will continue to do so. A public debate, he said, would ensure that top leaders, not servicemen and women, decide when it is appropriate.

"If someone asked me to draft the statute, I would say, 'Try buying them off, then use threats, then truth serum, and then if you came to a last recourse, nonlethal pain, a sterilized needle under the nail to produce excruciating pain,' " he said. "You would need a judge signing off on that. By making it open, we wouldn't be able to hide behind the hypocrisy."

Dershowitz said the judge might refuse to sign the order, creating a check that does not now exist.

Arthur Caplan, an ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rev. John P. Langan, a Jesuit priest and philosopher at Georgetown University, both said they believe torture can be used in some circumstances.

"I can imagine a few situations at the extreme where you might resort to torture," Caplan said. Langan said he began endorsing coercive techniques such as sleep deprivation and lengthy interrogations after the 1983 attack on U.S. Marines in Beirut, which killed 241 people.

Retired Marine Lt. Col. William Cowan, a commentator for Fox News, said in an article in the Atlantic Monthly that during the Vietnam War, he attached alligator clips to a prisoner's genitals and threatened him with electrocution. He said in an interview that torture produced valuable information.

"Three weeks after 9/11, if there had been another [attack] and we had found out Zacarias Moussaoui knew information that we did not get out of him, there would have been an absolute public outcry," he said. "There would have been rage; the government would have been blamed."

Torture should be used only with prisoners known to have crucial information, Cowan said. Depending on the situation, soldiers could use emotional or physical torture. In many cases, he said, fear alone would be sufficient. But for top al Qaeda suspects, such as Abu Zubaida, an al Qaeda leader arrested in Pakistan in 2002, Cowan recommended more.

"If it's Abu Zubaida, you start out being tough -- physical pain and emotional pain," he said. "You're putting him under physical duress outside the bounds of what the United Nations accepts."

Without public debate, he said, torture would still be used, even if top leaders never explicitly call for it. "The Pentagon wants success," Cowan said. "Rumsfeld wants to see numbers. There is a pressure to produce results."

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It was a small group of military police who carried out the horrific abuses in a distant country.

The torturers were not sadists, but perfectly normal people.

The torturers believed their unpleasant work would save lives.

Those statements do not refer to the U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib. The first sentence describes a German battalion that methodically tortured and killed thousands of Jews during World War II. The second describes a Stanford University psychology experiment that carefully screened out abnormal people and found that normal people given extraordinary power quickly turn sadistic. The third describes torturers in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, British officers in Northern Ireland and some police officials in Chicago.

"At the bottom of this behavior is not out-group hate, it's in-group love," said Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College who studies group dynamics. "It's doing what you think is dirty work, but someone's got to do it for our side."

Blaming individual soldiers only took the system off the hook, said Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford psychology experiment: "In my study, we put good people into a bad barrel, they came out bad apples," he said.

Christopher Browning, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland," said that although there are obvious differences between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and during the Holocaust, there are similarities.

"Our government from the top has sent innumerable signals that placed combating the 'war on terror' above any concern for the Geneva convention," he said by e-mail, adding that "the chickens have come home to roost."

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were similar to abuses in many other conflicts, said Conroy, author of an examination of torture in the Israeli-Palestinian and Northern Ireland conflicts and in the Chicago Police Department.

After the Israeli government gave permission to use torture in "ticking bomb" scenarios, the technique became widely applied to large numbers of Palestinian prisoners. Conroy said that the problem is that investigators rarely know who has valuable information.

In Chicago's South Side, Conroy said, police used electric shocks to interrogate murder suspects from 1973 to 1991. As in the case of military torturers, he said, the torture was justified in the belief that it would save lives.

But even on its own terms, Conroy said, torture may cost more lives than it saves. After the British used torture against a dozen Irish Republican Army prisoners in 1971, Conroy said, the news caused widespread anger.

"People started walking through the doors of the IRA begging to join," he said. "In the year after the torture was exposed, the number of deaths rose by 268 percent."

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