See No Evil

Bush is really fascinating. There was a televised interview with Barbara Bush during the [2000] campaign. She was talking about her son and relating this one incident where he had come home drunk and his father was walking out to talk to him. W was saying, "OK Dad, right now, let's do it." Clearly there's a tremendous amount of anger there. Not that this explains everything that's going on, but it's clearly, to me, a factor in his I'm-gonna-get-the-guy-who-threatened-my-dad-but-I'm-also-going-to-show-my-dad-that- I-can-do-stuff-that-he-couldn't-do [attitude].

How do you explain the behavior and the psychology of the soldiers who committed the Abu Ghraib abuses? They almost seem to be enjoying themselves.

It's the process of what's called "moral exclusion." This is a process that happens in wartime a lot where you dehumanize your enemy. Phillip Zimbardo ran the Stanford prison study back in 1971 where he set up a simulation of a prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. He randomly recruited 18 people--nine guards and nine prisoners--and randomly assigned them to be either guards or prisoners. He was going to run his experiment for two weeks. He had to abandon it after six days. The guys who were guards ended up really sadistically humiliating and abusing the prisoners, locking them in a closet for hours and hours in solitary confinement, having them clean toilets with their bare hands. The prisoners became demoralized and went along with this. It became an actual prison. The guards were having the prisoners simulate sodomy with each other.

Can you relate that to Abu Ghraib?

The role of a prison guard really dehumanizes the people who occupy it and comes with it the ultimate aphrodisiac of power. There's no coincidence that a lot of the abuse becomes sexualized. There has always been a fusion of sexuality and power--it's a way of getting off; it's a high to exercise that power.

© 2004