Factors Contributing to the Creation of the Iraqi Torturers - We Are All Complicit
June 20, 2005 11:16 AM   Subscribe

What kind of people are these torturers? Are they the bad apples of the American military, as the Bush administration has alleged, or is it the whole barrel that is bad, as Philip Zimbardo, former president of the American Psychological Association, declared? Back in 1975, one year after the fall of the military dictatorship in Greece, I received special permission to attend the trials of the Greek military police's torturers... These torturers were made, not born, to torture... These transformations from “ordinary” young men to fierce perpetrators are paralleled in other studies that I and my colleagues have carried out on Brazilian military and civil policemen and on elite special forces training in the US and elsewhere.
Psychological and Sociopolitical Factors Contributing to the Creation of the Iraqi Torturers: A Human Rights Issue
beliefnet: Michael Wolfe on relationship between Christian evangelism in the U.S. government and abuse of Muslims and the Qur'an
U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide
We Are All Complicit - But What Can We Do About It?
posted by y2karl (33 comments total)
 
I always wondered what happened to Philip Zimbardo. Just because he didn't like torturing young people prison-style doesn't mean he has to ruin it for the rest of us.
posted by geoff. at 11:22 AM on June 20, 2005


On Phil Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
posted by sellout at 11:45 AM on June 20, 2005


Excellent post.
posted by Doohickie at 11:46 AM on June 20, 2005


I imagine something similar took place to create Iran's SAVAK secret police, back when the Shah was installed. Excellent links.
posted by Rothko at 11:47 AM on June 20, 2005


y2karl, you've shot your load too early, I'm afraid. We've already had today's torture thread. You were supposed to do tomorrow's torture thread. Please check your rota.

Although, if your rota is in dumbass small print, I can understand why you're having difficulty reading it.
posted by veedubya at 11:48 AM on June 20, 2005


26 murders in custody, that is horrendous. I appreciate the last link, because I really hate it when people say "But Saddam..." to me that is the ultimate cop out.
posted by chaz at 11:53 AM on June 20, 2005


thank God they're not being abusive to rabbits!
posted by matteo at 12:00 PM on June 20, 2005


'Confess! ! ! Confess You Are The Rabbit! ! ! (while torturing a donkey...)
Seriously, any one of us could be 'the torturers'. The way to fix this thing is to take away the ability of the groups of persons most responsible for perpetrating these actions. Such as 'The School of The Americas', now name-revised to 'The School of Friendly Puppets'.
If this administration is so adamant about fighting a war on terror, it can start with itself, then move outwards from there to all the other despotic regimes it has either helped to start or given cause to emulate.
Well, the arms race is over, I guess now countries have to compete in a 'torture race' 'Oh, my regime is more repressive than *your* regime.'
posted by mk1gti at 12:13 PM on June 20, 2005


From the beliefnet article: The Times called Guantanamo "a propaganda gift to America's enemies," an embarrassment to our allies, a repudiation of our nation's justice system, and a recruiting tool for terrorists.
posted by caddis at 12:14 PM on June 20, 2005


US$1 says Iraq turns into a fundamentalist Muslim state by way of violent overthrow within 20 years.
posted by Rothko at 12:29 PM on June 20, 2005


Hmm... yet more MeFi GitMo goodness... caddis is bang-on with the quote. Whatever the folks at GoDaddy might think, GitMo is just plain bad for the USA's image.
posted by gwenzel at 12:49 PM on June 20, 2005


The '....' in the mouseover titles indicates an edit done after the post was made. Tastes differ as to use of title="" but space was not taken up on the front page by its use in this post. These edits, done without explanation or notification, to my mind changed the content of the text quoted substantially. Consider this posted by y2karl as interpeted by whim of second party.
posted by y2karl at 1:33 PM on June 20, 2005


Arbitrarily altering a post for no good reason really creeps me out.
posted by y2karl at 1:45 PM on June 20, 2005


It seems schizophrenic when you constantly hear this "Support the Troops" rhetoric yet see an immediate knee jerk tendancy to blame the troops for anything that goes wrong.
But then I find it hard to relate to people without the testicles (or ovaries) to take responsibility for their directives.
I see no evidence the US wants to win this war at all. To paraphrase Orwell, the point of torture is torture. Bushco clearly wants to exercise power, whether it's elements within the administration, or whatever - the tactics are clearly lacking. You become a torturer and you are no longer a soldier. It's disgusting to see what was a well sorted volunteer military twisted into....this.

Damn that Bill Clinton!
/sarcasm
posted by Smedleyman at 2:26 PM on June 20, 2005


y2karl, maybe you are misunderstanding the function of the links. See, these hyperlinks will take people to the page if the people want to read it. Therefore, you don't need to cut and paste the article into whatever title things you do.

Are you really suggesting that the content of your post is changed by that edit? You already flaunt a disregard of the guidelines by posting the same argument consistently and link-dumping sites to get around the "one post per day" concept. Now you are going to complain because you can't beat us over the head even more by including the entire link in a title space?
posted by dios at 2:43 PM on June 20, 2005


Arbitrarily altering a post for no good reason really creeps me out.

Sorry, I suppose I should have dropped you a note. Your post titles are uwieldy, and create screen havoc when people try to mouseover your links to see where they go. They are copied and pasted text from the pages they go to, text that people can read if they click through your links.
posted by jessamyn at 3:04 PM on June 20, 2005


Consider this posted by y2karl as interpeted by whim of second party.
posted by y2karl


I bet if you had your own blog you wouldn't be censored there.
posted by Ryvar at 3:28 PM on June 20, 2005


...I suppose I should have dropped you a note.

I guess I should run all my posts by you first then.
posted by y2karl at 3:47 PM on June 20, 2005


I guess I should run all my posts by you first then.

She made an edit to the form of the post, which is something that happens ALL THE TIME around here. She didn't change your argument or any of the links themselves. Get over it. One reality of posting on MeFi is that anything is subject to Matt and Jessamyn's edits to make the site more friendly to everyone. Part of that is making sure that mouseovers don't kill browsers and/or fill screens. If you don't like having to play nicely in the sandbox then GYOB.
posted by thedevildancedlightly at 3:52 PM on June 20, 2005


Perhaps complaints could be taken to Metatalk?
posted by Rothko at 3:53 PM on June 20, 2005


The text omitted was not so long compared to previous posts and content was edited from my point of view. It's the unannounced arbitrary editing of content part that creeps me out. Edits should be signed.
posted by y2karl at 4:05 PM on June 20, 2005


This article explains the reasons that I knew that the Koran desecration stories were true, even before the pentagon confirmed them (after so many heated denials). A very good summary. Dipshit religioid militarists are the death of the US.
posted by telstar at 4:14 PM on June 20, 2005


making sure that mouseovers don't kill browsers

I love the post and I often like to be able to read the stuff in the titles. However, they do sometimes persist in my browser after a mouseover forcing me to reload the page to make them go away. You could do a [more inside].
posted by caddis at 4:15 PM on June 20, 2005


Quit fucking spamming MeFi, then. I tell you, y2k, I value you as a fellow member, but your frigging booksized quotes, micro text, and silly-ass mouseover texts are enough to make a person curse your soul.
posted by five fresh fish at 4:31 PM on June 20, 2005


Omitting the simple courtesy of letting one know when one's post is monekyed with rankles--the phrase no brainer comes to mind--as does the fact that it is on the slippery slope of changing the meaning of the post itself. Nothing I post is sacred to me. Being blind sided does matter, on the other hand. I would have no kick otherwise.
posted by y2karl at 4:37 PM on June 20, 2005


Jesus, she apologized. What more do you want?
posted by justgary at 5:08 PM on June 20, 2005


Can we please get back to torture now?
posted by caddis at 6:27 PM on June 20, 2005


Nothing to see here about American torturers folks--y2karl didn't do a good job in phrasing.
posted by bardic at 6:48 PM on June 20, 2005


Who was on board the CIA-chartered plane Reg No N313P that landed in Shannon on 15 December 2003 en route from Iraq?
posted by ijoshua at 7:07 PM on June 20, 2005


Hey ijoshua, that's the first I've heard about that plane, but after some research, it doesn't sound good.
posted by Balisong at 7:59 PM on June 20, 2005


It's interesting as a case study in the operation of the smear machine, but really more telling as an instance of the ethical black hole into which the contemporary right has fallen. Nowadays, every time somebody raises the topic of immoral torture-related policies undertaken by the Bush administration the instant conservative reaction is to transform the conversation into a debate about the appropriateness of the critics' rhetoric. Every time, the point of the defense is not to defend the conduct in question, but simply to note that someone, somewhere, at some time has done worse things. We're better than Saddam Hussein! Our prisons aren't as bad as Auschwitz! People may be detained arbitrarily without hearings, appeal, due process, or POW status, but it's no Gulag

Matt Yglesias
posted by y2karl at 9:21 PM on June 20, 2005


"Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-----torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-----which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

George Orwell
posted by leftcoastbob at 5:26 PM on June 21, 2005


Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects at Bagram and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantanamo and sent others off to be boiled and fried and killed off by our "friends" without the embarrassment of being present. Saddam was much worse.

Well put. As bad as Guantanamo seems to be, what happens when it closes?

Khaled el-Masri

What happened to extradition proceedings? What happened to the rule of law? What happened to common human decency?

Unfortunately, 9/11 trumps everything. I knew when it happened that the loss of life would only be the beginning of the tragedy. I can only hope Americans wake up at some point.

y2karl-style: I always wondered what happened to Philip Zimbardo.

He's still one of Stanford's "most popular" professors. But he should watch the Flash.

posted by mrgrimm at 5:29 PM on June 22, 2005


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