The Psychodynamics
Of Occupation
By Stephen Soldz
04 May, 2004
Information Clearing
House
This
week, CBS' 60 Minutes II published the now infamous pictures of abuse
and torture by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq
(some of the pictures can be viewed on the New Yorker web site at
http://www.newyorker.com/online/slideshows/pop/?040510onslpo_prison
Seymour Hersh has
documented in the May 10, 2004 New Yorker (Torture
at Abu Ghraib) that the abuse shown in these photos was just
the tip of the iceberg. A 53-page Pentagon report completed in February
listed some of the abuse:
"Breaking chemical
lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold
water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and
a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police
guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being
slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical
light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to
frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one
instance actually biting a detainee."
Other evidence in
Hersh's piece indicates that in at least one instance, a prisoner was
tortured to death under interrogation, then his injuries were disguised
and body disposed of. Other deaths have also been referred to.
As Hersh documents,
the Pentagon was well aware of the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact
An internal report
by the Army's chief law-enforcement officer last November documented
that the Military Police (MPs) guarding the prison faced tension between
their responsibility to maintain an orderly prison and the involvement
of the same MPs in softening up prisoners for interrogation. Yet, no
action was taken.
One of the six military
defendants in this case has emphasized the lack of any training or guidance
in how to treat the prisoners, and the absence of any orientation to
responsibilities under the Geneva Convention. While it is easy to dismiss
this complaint as an attempt to avoid responsibility for reprehensible
actions, the complaint does raise an important issue. The MPs were not
provided any orientation or guidance because protecting Iraqi detainees
was simply not of interest to anyone in charge. Further, no doubt the
attitude, common among prison guards, was that the detainees must have
done something bad to be detained there. So protecting their rights
or their bodies was not important and protecting their spirit was a
hindrance to the important task of extracting intelligence about resistance
activities.
While the emerging
official documentation of Pentagon awareness is useful, it's important
to keep in mind that the conditions in Abu Ghraib and the other US detention
facilities have not been a secret from anyone who wanted to know. There
have been dozens, if not hundreds of accounts of former detainees describing
the abuses. The international press has repeatedly published articles
on this. Of course, the abuse has seldom been reported with any prominence
in the American press, but this is not surprising, as the U.S. press
has until quite recently been primarily a mouthpiece for official claims.
Thus, for example,
on July 23, 2003, Amnesty International published Iraq: Memorandum on
concerns relating to law and order, which warned of "allegations
of torture or ill-treatment" for those in US detention, including
at Abu Ghraib. As stated there "the organization has received a
number of reports of torture or ill-treatment by Coalition Forces not
confined to criminal suspects. Reported methods include prolonged sleep
deprivation; prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined
with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding; and exposure to bright
lights. Such treatment would amount to 'torture or inhuman treatment'
prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention and by international human
rights law. Amnesty International's concerns with regard to allegations
of inhuman treatment immediately after arrest and in detention camps
run by the US military have been raised in its letter to Ambassador
Paul Bremer of 26 June 2003. Regrettably, testimonies from recently
released detainees held at Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib Prison do not
suggest that conditions of detention have improved."
That report further
states "Amnesty International has received a number of reports
of cases of detainees who have died in custody, mostly as a result of
shooting by members of the Coalition Forces. Other cases of deaths in
custody where ill-treatment may have caused or contributed to death
have been reported." This report contains several case studies
of abuse and torture of detainees. Saudi Arabian national Abdallah Khudhran
al-Shamran, for example, "alleged that he was subjected to beatings
and electric shocks."
As one other example
from this report, Khreisan Khalis Aballey reported that while detained
"he was made to stand or kneel facing a wall for seven-and-a-half
days, hooded, and handcuffed tightly with plastic strips. At the same
time a bright light was placed next to his hood and distorted music
was playing the whole time. During all this period he was deprived of
sleep (though he may have been unconscious for some periods). He reported
that at one time a US soldier stamped on his foot and as a result one
of his toenails was torn off. The prolonged kneeling made his knees
bloody, so he mostly stood; when, after seven-and-a-half days he was
told he was to be released and told he could sit, he said that his leg
was the size of a football."
This July 23rd,
2003 report was not Amnesty International's first complaint about the
conditions of US detainees in Iraq. For example, the June 30, 2003 BBC
News had this story: U.S. condemned over Iraq rights, which reported
that Amnesty International warned that "conditions of detention
Iraqis are held under... may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
or punishment, banned by international law."
As another instance,
in the July 22nd issue of the British newspaper the Independent, veteran
middle east journalist Robert Fisk published The ugly truth of America's
Camp Cropper, a story to shame us all (available at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4191.htm).
In this article, Fisk tells the story of Qais Mohamed al-Salman, an
engineer and Iraqi exile who returned after Saddam was overthrown to
help his country. He was lucky; he was only abused and had a label of
"suspected assassin" pinned on his clothes. As Fisk reports,
based on what he considers to be an impeccable Western source: "only
'selected' prisoners are beaten during interrogation" there. Eventually,
Qais al-Salman was released, but his mother had already given him up
for dead as the Americans never notified the families of those they
detained.
As a final example,
the Iraqi blogger "Riverbend", in her blog Baghdad Burning,
included in her March 29, 2004 entry: Tales from Abu Ghraib..., the
story of a young woman, M., who had recently been released in mid January
from Abu Ghraib, after being arrested with her mother and four brothers.
While in detention, she herself was beaten and she witnessed several
other beatings, including that of her mother, and "the rape of
a male prisoner by one of the jailors." Riverbend concludes the
heart wrenching tale with "By the end of her tale, M. was crying
silently and my mother and Umm Hassen were hastily wiping away tears.
All I could do was repeat, 'I'm so sorry... I'm really sorry...' and
a lot of other useless words. She shook her head and waved away my words
of sympathy, 'It's ok- really- I'm one of the lucky ones... all they
did was beat me'" (italics added).
These stories are
among the many I have included on my web page: Iraq Occupation and Resistance
Report over the last year of Iraqi occupation. If I, a single individual
maintaining a web page in my spare time, was well aware of the abuses
being reported in the US prisons in Iraq, the only way the top generals,
Pentagon officials, senior Administration policy-makers such as the
President and Vice-President, and U.S. reporters could be ignorant of
them is if they willfully chose to be ignorant. Much more likely, they
were aware but considered these abuses - like the ones documented among
detainees in Afghanistan, and those reported by the few released detainees
from Guantanamo - to be the inevitable costs of war and occupation,
especially, as is the case in Iraq, when that occupation now is opposed
by the majority of the occupied.
Under conditions
of occupation, the occupier is faced with the task of attempting to
win the support of the occupied population when possible and of instilling
fear and a sense of hopelessness when winning them over is not possible.
Further, the occupation must be justified to the soldiers of the occupying
power, who may have reservations about the role they are expected to
play. Humiliation of the occupied is an important element in both of
these tasks. The occupying army learns to view the occupied as inferior,
as not as "civilized" as the occupiers view themselves. Thus,
Hersh quotes the testimony of Specialist Mathew Wisdom, an M.P. at Abu
Ghraib as he described one of the scenes of coerced sex between detainees
depicted in the photographs: "I saw SSG Frederick walking towards
me, and he said, 'Look what these animals do when you leave them alone
for two seconds'" (italics added). In case we are tempted to dismiss
this as simply the aberration of a sick individual, consider the comments
of a senior British officer in Iraq to a reporter from the British Daily
Telegraph on April 12, 2004 (available at: British commanders condemn
US military tactics:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/11/1081621835663.html
about the attitude
of the U.S. military toward the Iraqi populace: "They don't see
the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen.
They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British
are." (Of course, recent revelations of torture of detainees at
British hands raise questions as to the degree of concern the British
have for Iraqi life. And the over 100,000 Iraqis killed in the British
occupation earlier in the century make clear that Iraqi life was cheap
when Britain was the dominant colonial power. See Hussein Askary: Lessons
To Be Learned: Iraqi Resistance to British Occupation 80 Years Ago)
To view the Iraqis
as animals, or as subhuman, as untermenschen, makes it easier to dominate
them, to break down their doors in the middle of the night, to imprison
them without charges and without notifying their families, and to use
torture and "torture lite" (to use that apt term of Ira Chernus:
U.S. "Torture Lite Led to Saddam Capture) in order to break their
spirit as an aid to interrogation. If, further, one can get the occupied
to view themselves as inferior to the occupiers, the occupation may
eventually be seen as acceptable, as natural, even as beneficial. This
was the psychology of colonialism and it is the unconscious logic dominating
the Iraqi occupation.
Of course, the occupiers
usually begin more benevolently. The occupied are more akin to children,
who need to be "educated", to the standards of "Christian
civilization" in the old days, to "Western democracy"
in the present world. Trouble arises when this projected image - with
all its accompanying fantasy of being welcomed with open arms by the
"children" eager to be educated - collides with the unfortunate
reality that the occupied are really adults from a different culture,
with their own traditions, wishes, and dreams. Then the occupation gets
ugly. If the children are so ungrateful as not to welcome the education
the invaders so graciously provide, it's surely a sign of their inferiority.
Only animals or untermenschen would be so crass as to refuse the kind
offer of civilization. Well, they're not worthy of us any way, so it
doesn't much matter how we teat them.
If one thing became
clear in the 20th century, it is that ordinary people are capable of
the most horrendous acts. As both psychoanalysts and social psychologists
have pointed out, the capacity to do evil resides in us all. Certain
circumstances are more likely to encourage the expression of this universal
capacity. These circumstances include being one of a group, being able
to attribute responsibility to others or to lofty goals, being in an
environment experienced as alien and dangerous, and being in an overall
climate in which there is little or no accountability. All of these
circumstances are present to a great degree among the occupying army
in Iraq.
We have known for
a long time that absolute power corrupts. Therefore, those who create
an environment in which occupying soldiers - Americans - have absolute
power with virtually no limits and no accountability, bear the ultimate
responsibility for the horrors that occurred at Abu Ghraib, and that
continue to occur on a daily basis throughout occupied Iraq.
If President Bush,
the senior US generals, and all the other commentators filling the airwaves
with pious outrage are not directly lying, it is solely because of that
marvelous human ability, identified by psychoanalysts and novelists,
to know and not know something at the same time. As the soldiers caught
in those horrifying photos are crucified in the press and in the courts,
let's not pretend that its because of their personal weaknesses that
these horrors occurred. Let's not protect ourselves by pretending that
it's only the evil that resides in a few bad soldiers that allows such
barbarities to occur. Such pretense is but a defense, in both the legal
and the psychoanalytic meanings of that term. Rather, let's remember
that it's a direct consequence of the logic of occupation and it is
the planners and organizers of that occupation who bear primary responsibility.
Further, each and every one of us who has not done our best to know
what was being done by our country in a foreign country, who has let
ignorance, hopelessness, and the desire for a normal life interfere
with the citizens' responsibility to know, and to act to change that
which is bad in our country's behavior, bears our own responsibility.
These atrocities were truly committed in our name. They are our atrocities.
So what should be
done? Of course, the overall goal must be to end the occupation, to
bring the soldiers home and allow the Iraqis to determine their own
fate. They may not make the decisions we would make, but that's what
adults do, they make their own decisions. And the occupation will end.
The recent CNN/USA Today poll of Iraqi attitudes demonstrated strong
opposition to occupation before the recent uprising. All accounts indicate
that, over the last three weeks, Iraqi sentiment has moved decisively
against the occupation. The release of these photographs will be the
final straw. No claims to moral authority or legitimacy with Iraqis
will survive. All that will remain is brute force, and brute force is
a weak weapon against modern nationalism. Thus, the US will either withdraw
soon, without further loss of life, or it will be thrown out after massive
conflict, suffering, and death. But it will leave.
In the meantime,
there are steps that can be taken to reduce the levels of abuse at Abu
Ghraib and other detention facilities. These must be based on limiting
the corrupting absolute power that naturally adheres there, as well
as on recognizing that institutions usually place self-protection at
the top of their list of priorities. Thus, the world should not allow
this be a matter for the American military alone to deal with. We must
support the call of Amnesty International for an independent investigation
of the conditions at Abu Ghraib and the other detention facilities.
But, we must not stop there. It is vital that all prisons and detention
centers be routinely monitored by independent observers not bound to
speak privately. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
does occasionally visit these centers, but they do not have observers
based there and the ICRC policy is only to make their conclusions known
privately to the institution they inspect while not releasing any report
to the public. These horrors make clear that this level of oversight
is no longer sufficient. We need an international campaign to demand
permanent, independent, international observers in every Iraqi prison
and detention center. Further, this is the time to demand the same for
the detention centers in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The world outcry
over these atrocities creates a moment to have our message paid attention
to and an opportunity to act. Let's not lose the opportunity to start
turning around the barbarities we have come to accept as normal, or
despicable but impossible to challenge.
Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst
and a faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the
Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is also a founder of Psychoanalysts
for Peace and Justice, and maintains the the Iraq
Occupation and Resistance Report web page.