See No Evil

As details of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib became known, not everyone was shocked. A caller on Rush Limbaugh's show likened the torture of prisoners to "a college fraternity prank." The host picked up on the cue and started riffing. "Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time."

During the Senate investigation into the abuse, Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma opined that "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment." Meanwhile every day at least a handful of NEWSWEEK readers write in to say that they are tired of images of the abuse or to say that they don't want to see photographs of coffins bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers.

What's going on here? Is it unpatriotic to question the behavior of American soldiers, to publish photos of their caskets? Or is there a sort of willful denial at play here? Michael Milburn believes the latter is the case. Milburn, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts and coauthor of "The Politics of Denial" (MIT Press), has extensively explored what determines political attitudes, the role of emotion in public opinion and the effects of the mass media on political attitudes and social behavior. He recently spoke with NEWSWEEK's Brian Braiker about political denial--what it is, what causes it and when, if ever, it can be a positive thing. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What are the politics of denial?

Michael Milburn: We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies like support for the death penalty, opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force. We used a notion of therapy as a general indicator of denial or lack of denial. Well, the extent to which emotion connected to childhood punishment was driving their political attitudes, when they had an opportunity to sort of reflect on that and [have a] short-term catharsis experience, that sort of energy disappears.

So are you saying that [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld could use a little therapy?