The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Since Chip’s trial, more evidence has revealed the complicity of several military commanders in the abuses and torture on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib prison. The evidence reveals a modern ‘administrative’ evil, which exists in both public and private organizations operating within a legal (but not ethical) framework to inflict suffering through systemic pressures.

Four investigations were conducted of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses: three were commissioned by the military to focus on perpetrators and one was commissioned by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Every investigation report noted the systemic and situational forces at play in Abu Ghraib. They differed only in the conclusions drawn from such observations.

The Army’s chief law enforcement officer, Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, prepared the first report on orders from Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez. The document reviews the prison system throughout Iraq and includes recommendations for improvement. It reports “fuzzy boundaries” (382) between the military police and the military intelligence officers and concludes that system-wide training and manpower inadequacies and human rights violations pervade the US Iraqi prisons.

General Sanchez assigned Major General Antonio M. Taguba to conduct a more thorough investigation of detainee abuse, undocumented prisoner escapes, and widespread failures in discipline and accountability. This report stated that systemic problems plague the institutions. When interviewed about the abuses, Sergeant Javal Davis stated that he witnessed prisoners being forced to perform what he considered immoral acts but he did not report the abuse: “I assumed that if they were doing things out of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something” (384).

The Taguba report noted the lack of prisoner count standardization and its effect on order within the prison, as well as the lack of training, lack of resources, prison overcapacity, and top-level action which “strengthened the impression that there would be no payback for abusing prisoners” (385). The report buttresses Chip’s claims that unidentified civilians gave orders to him and his staff, which created a confusing structure for military police officers (MPs). The Taguba report identifies specific commanders who did not lead well, and therefore, warranted punishment, as well as civilian interrogators and interpreters who inappropriately involved MPs in interrogations for which they were not trained. The report charged them with specific offenses including “evil of inaction” (388) and other offenses such as failing to report soldiers who abused detainees.

Another review of 94 confirmed cases of detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq is drafted by Lieutenant General Paul T. Milolashek. The report identifies the many flawed decisions of senior commanders and military officers but concludes that the abuses are solely the fault of the low-ranking soldiers who committed the offenses.

Another report, drafted by Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones and Major General George R. Fay, ultimately blames the “small groups of morally corrupt soldiers and civilians” (392), but the report also addresses situational and systemic factors in the abuse. It lists seven primary contributing factors to the abuses, all but one of which are situational or systemic factors. Zimbardo points out that the individuals who committed the abuses are not the only ones at fault; rather, “the picture that is emerging is one of complex multiple causality” (397).

The Schlesinger Report also provides insight into the systems at play, and Zimbardo explains that the details it provides makes a link between the stressors of the situation and the abusers. The report specifies flaws in operation and identifies problems in leadership and command. The report begins by noting “the widespread nature of ‘abuse’ across all US military facilities” (398), including incidents more horrific than those exposed in Abu Ghraib. The report specifies five major problems: inadequate training of MPs and MIs, inadequate equipment and resources, extreme pressure on interrogators to produce intelligence, weak and inexperienced leadership, and the CIA operating under its own rules, without accountability. The report further addresses the conditions of the prison and makes clear “the total failure of leadership at every level and its contribution to the abuses by the MPs” (399).

The Schlesinger Report states that the following psychological motivators were present at Abu Ghraib: deindividuation, dehumanization, enemy image, groupthink, moral disengagement, social facilitation, and other environmental factors. It notes the practice of stripping detainees. The tactic was initially employed to increase the vulnerability of detainees and to facilitate compliance with interrogators, but it became a dehumanizing practice which led to many of the heinous acts. These investigative reports all specify situational/environmental and systemic/situational influences on behavior but “stop short of attributing blame to higher levels in the chain of command” (402).

A 2005 Human Rights Watch report calls for an investigation of the architects of the policies that led to the widespread abuses, tortures, and murders of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba. The report identifies the “architects” of the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and former CIA director George Tenet), the “justifiers” (the lawyers who legalized it), the “‘foremen’ on the torture construction job” (the military leaders), and the “technicians” (the daily laborers, or the soldiers) (403). The report notes that the methods approved by senior officials are coercive and widely condemned by the United States as barbaric torture when practiced by others. As well, the Army field manual condemns such practices as torture. Both US and international law assert that “individuals in civilian or military authority may be criminally liable for crimes committed by those under their command” (406), but the military has not attempted to prosecute any officer under such doctrine.

The Human Rights Watch argues for criminal investigations under the terms of the War Crimes Act of 1996, the Anti-Torture Act of 1996, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The organization asserts that Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques and approved the act of hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross, thus creating the conditions for troops to commit war crimes. The report notes that he may also incur liability as an instigator of such crimes. As evidence, the report cites a list of interrogation methods that violate the Geneva Convention and the Convention against torture and that Rumsfeld authorized. The International Committee of the Red Cross repeatedly warned the Department of Defense about torture and abuse in its facilities. In response, the Department of Defense curtailed inspections and ignored the abuses, which worsened.

The Human Rights Watch accuses Tenet of several violations, including the specific authorization and direction of torture tactics such as: “waterboarding,” withholding medicine, feigning suffocation, utilizing stress positions, light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and false flag operations which “mak[e] detainees believe they are in the hands of foreign governments” (408). The report also alleges that, under Tenet’s direction, the CIA hid detainees by placing them in secret locations beyond the protection of the law and used ‘ghost detainees’ kept off the books and hidden from investigators. All are violations of international law. Historian Alfred McCoy states that “the CIA was both the lead agency at Abu Ghraib and the source of systematic tortures practiced in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq” (411), so therefore, the soldiers at Abu Ghraib can be understood as loyalists who followed the orders delivered from much higher up in the chain of command.

General Sanchez “authorized interrogation methods that violate the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture” (411), which he formalized as rules in a memo dated September 14, 2003. Rumsfeld’s commissioned Schlesinger Report concludes that a dozen of these techniques exceeds the bounds of acceptability in Army Field Manual 34-52 and are more extreme than the methods approved for Guantanamo. General Sanchez also lied to Congress in a sworn testimony regarding his ordering of such techniques.

The Human Rights Watch report alleges that Major General Geoffrey Miller knew about the crimes at Guantanamo and that he “may have proposed interrogation methods for Iraq that were the proximate cause of the torture and war crimes committed at Abu Ghraib” (413). Miller developed specialized interrogation teams which integrated military intelligence personnel with military police and engaged in interrogation tactics violative of international law. Miller encouraged the teams to become more aggressive in their interrogation, and he blurred the lines of authority, creating a chaotic and confusing situation for soldiers under his command.

As further evidence of the systemic and situational nature of these offenses, acts of brutality were carried out by US soldiers throughout Iraq in non-prison settings. This entire period is wrought with confirmed acts of civilian mass murder, rape, and violent beatings by US troops. Specialist Anthony Lagouranis began documenting the abuses, some of which took place in civilian homes, and sending them up the chain of command, but this documentation, which included photographs, was ignored.

Culpability reaches the highest levels. President Bush authorized “renditions,” which is nomenclature for disappearing prisoners to countries where the use of torture is well-known. President Bush also authorized “reverse renditions,” in which foreign authorities arrest suspects and transfer them into US custody in a location where basic legal protections under international law are not afforded. Even the administration’s framing of the conflict as a “war on terror” creates an “ideological foundation [that] has been used by virtually all nations as a device for gaining popular and military support for aggression, as well as repression” (430). Zimbardo notes that and “[f]ear was the linchpin that gained the majority support of the US public and Congress first for a preemptive war against Iraq” (430).

A report drawn from data in a public database of statements by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other administration staff concludes that the “officials made 237 specific “false and misleading” statements on the Iraqi threat in 125 public appearances, an average of about 50 for each disciple” (431). The administration created a color-code for terrorist threat levels that kept the public feeling fearful. The administration began referring to President Bush as “commander in chief,” and in turn, vastly expanded his presidential powers under the belief that he and his administration were above national and international law. Cheney lobbied for an exception to McCain’s amendment to the Department of Defense’s budget authorization bill to allow the CIA “to use whatever means it deemed necessary to extract information from its suspects” (432).

In August of 2002, the administration’s Department of Justice drafted a memo now referred to as the “Torture Memo.” The memo narrowly defines torture as occurring only in the most extreme circumstances and asserts that the US ratification of the 1994 anti-torture statute is unconstitutional because it interferes with the president’s power as commander in chief. The memo also gives the president authority to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions and asserts that persons captured in Afghanistan, Taliban soldiers, al-Qaeda suspects, insurgents, and everyone else in custody are not considered POWs and as such, not granted corresponding legal protections. These “enemy noncombatants” can be held indefinitely at any facility in the world. Circumstantial evidence exists that decisions were deliberately made in a manner “to insulate Bush and to give him deniability” (435).

Zimbardo concludes by defining “administrative evil” as existing in a framework of policy and beyond the abilities of any one person, yet he argues that “organizations must have leaders, and those leaders must be held accountable for creating or maintaining such evil” (438).