Fixing Hell

by Larry C. James

  One of the key revelations from the experiment was that the situation caused the participants’ behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. The “guards” weren’t sadistic bastards who seized on the opportunity to abuse others, and the “prisoners” weren’t submissive weaklings predisposed to accept their abuse. In both groups, they were normal young men turned into those personas by the situation.

  I asked Zimbardo questions about the oversight and the basic level of controls, and the checks and balances for the study. The first major failing was that Zimbardo assigned himself the role as the prison superintendent. This meant that he was supposed to be the overall director of the study and at the same time serve as the head of the simulated prison—supervising the role-playing while also role-playing himself. He admitted that this was a problem. As the director of the study and head researcher he was supposed to be sort of a third party, a detached, objective observer. He admitted that by being a participant he became blinded and missed some of the problems that occurred early on. Another problem was that there was no medical monitor with expertise in the effects of sleep deprivation and food deprivation upon the prisoners. That made me think that having physicians assigned to work for me at Abu Ghraib would help ensure safety at all times. We would need medical experts to monitor the welfare of the detainees who were being interrogated.

  Zimbardo went on to talk about the vagueness of the instructions that he gave to the guards, and it was clear that this became a major problem within a matter of days.

  “When I told them not to physically harm the prisoners, I thought I was setting some limits. It turned out that my instructions should have been much more explicit,” he said.

  I remarked on how, no matter how much I study the Stanford experience and similar experiments on human behavior, it’s hard to accept how normal people, good people, can be driven to inhumane treatment of one another under certain conditions. Zimbardo told me the idea chills him also, and he probably knows the truth of that more than any other professional in this field.

  “About a third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. And most of the guards were disappointed when the experiment concluded early,” he said. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it? And it’s not just the participants either. Out of more than fifty outside persons who saw the prison, who actually saw what was going on inside and how things had gotten out of control, Maslach was the only one who questioned the morality of the whole thing.”

  Zimbardo emphasized to me that the rules and policies for what should and should not happen must be made clear, and that there has to be firm and constant oversight from the leadership at all prisons. Moreover, he went on to explain that the living conditions, the overall environment, could have been important in steering guards toward abuse.

  “You have to look at how these people are living. When you live in a hellhole, your mind is going to go in that direction too,” he said. “Perhaps the generals and colonels and senior leaders may have never told anyone to torture a prisoner, but if this Abu Ghraib is as horrible an environment as I’ve heard, the living conditions and the tacit approval of higher-ups may have combined to set the conditions for what occurred there.”

  We marveled at how the human mind could jump the rails so quickly and with such intensity. After a while we moved on to talking about the Confederate prison in Andersonville, Georgia, during the Civil War, a sort of precursor to Abu Ghraib in which Americans held other Americans in the worst conditions. As noted in Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson, Andersonville was the most notorious of all Civil War prisons, hastily constructed in early 1864 in southwest Georgia to corral the growing number of Union soldiers taken prisoner. Built to accommodate up to 10,000 captured soldiers, it was soon jammed with over 32,000. The open-air stockade with twenty-foot-high log walls was a horrible place. A stagnant stream named Sweet Water Branch ran through the camp and prisoners were forced to use it as a sewer as well as for drinking and bathing.

  Prisoners were forbidden to construct shelters, and most had to survive while fully exposed to the elements. Prisoners starved on a diet of rancid grain and mealy beans or peas. Sickness often was a certain road to death, as there was no medical care, McPherson explains. During the summer, more than a hundred prisoners died every day, while others were killed by marauders among their own ranks. More than 30 percent of the 45,000 who entered Andersonville never came out alive. The Union had similar prison camps, including one in Elmira, New York, where the death rate approached Andersonville’s, despite the North being much better equipped to cope with captured soldiers.

  After the war, the North accused the Confederacy of deliberately abusing Union prisoners at Andersonville, and the prison’s commander, Captain Henry Wirz, was hanged in November 1865. His crime was cited as “impairing the health and destroying the lives of prisoners.”

  Abu Ghraib was not unique, Zimbardo and I agreed. We knew we could take lessons from the past and apply them to this current problem. We agreed that underlying the overall problem was a leadership failure. By not putting procedures in place to prevent these abuses, they were inevitable once Abu Ghraib received the very first prisoner. Not only had this occurred at Abu Ghraib and Andersonville, but it had also happened in many other prisons around the world when the proper procedures were not put into place. In Brazil, for instance, the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s used its prisons to torture those who spoke out against the government. We began to reflect back on my work at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. My staff and I wrote standard operating procedures (SOPs) and briefed many leaders on how to do this right. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Cuba during my time there, as did other senior leaders. The system had the knowledge of how to do it right, how to manage prisoners without resorting to the abuses we saw at Gitmo.

  We already fixed this, I kept thinking. Why the hell is it happening all over again?

  The more we talked it over, the more Zimbardo and I arrived at the same conclusion. Clearly, the leaders at the highest levels never thought that we would be in Iraq for more than three to six months so there was no need to prepare and establish a proper prison system. All my guidance was there in black and white, ready to be implemented, but the head honchos must have figured we were just going to be in and out of Iraq in a flash, so why bother?

  We finished our breakfast and I finished my notes. Zimbardo gave me a big hug and I told him that I’d keep in touch with him as best I could while I was at Abu Ghraib. We tentatively set plans to meet again at the upcoming American Psychological Association convention that was to be held in August 2004, in Honolulu. I told him if I was able to attend the conference, I would like to sit down with him again and compare notes about my experience.

  My talk with Zimbardo reaffirmed that no amount of professional discourse with another psychologist can make some things clear. You may understand it in some intellectual sense as a medical professional, but you still have to deal with it as a human being. As I headed back to my car I couldn’t help but ask myself, How could any American soldier do that? How could the environment be so bad that it would lead any red-blooded American soldier to do the things that I saw in those horrible pictures of naked dog piles and prisoners being tortured at Abu Ghraib?

  I knew that I could not answer these questions yet, that I would have to wait until I arrived at Abu Ghraib. The trip would be long and exhausting, taking eight days in all. First I would fly from Honolulu to San Francisco, then to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for some additional briefing, then on to Germany, Kuwait City, and finally to Abu Ghraib.

  I went back to our temporary hotel room at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, picked up my wife, and headed for the beach at Bellows Air Force Station—a gorgeous area that is accessible only to military personnel and their guests. Janet and I had spent many days there, alone and with our son and granddaughter. It was a place that always brought me immense peace and satisfaction. But on this day, as I lay on that sandy beach, star
ing up at that beautiful blue Hawaiian sky, I couldn’t stop asking myself the same thing, over and over. How could any American soldier torture another living human being?

  I did my best to focus on enjoying the time with my family, but I was busy preparing for my trip to Abu Ghraib. Within days of my seeing Zimbardo, a package arrived in the mail. He had had his staff mail me a copy of a DVD entitled Quiet Rage, the definitive video account of the Stanford Prison Experiment, with extensive footage taken during the experiment and commentary from Zimbardo and others. I was glad to have it in hand because, like most psychologists, I had read about the experiment in graduate school but had never seen the video.

  Within a week, I was wheels up and en route to Iraq. All told, it would take about twenty-seven hours in the air for me to arrive at Camp Victory, Iraq, the headquarters of the U.S. forces. I flew to Fort Bragg and then to Kuwait—on commercial flights, thank God. Military flights lacked the comforts of even the most budget-conscious commercial airlines. Soldiers flying with heavy loads and all sorts of gear made them even less comfortable. Plus, even when I flew in civilian clothes on military flights, the young soldiers still knew that I was an officer. That usually wasn’t a problem, but for this flight I needed anonymity and solitude to have a well-crafted plan in place by the time my wheels touched down.

  Once my United Airlines plane was en route to the West Coast, I popped in Zimbardo’s Quiet Rage DVD in my laptop and watched it several times on the five-hour flight from Honolulu to San Francisco. When I got off the plane in San Francisco I had a good three-hour layover, so I headed for the USO lounge because I knew that I would find comfort and friendship being around other soldiers and sailors. There was only one empty seat available in the lounge, so I put my gear down and sat in the soft brown leather chair. I was expecting to just drift away for a nap. But after a few minutes, I overheard a soldier talking with his wife on a cell phone. I glanced over in his direction and saw a big beefy soldier hunched over, elbows on his knees, phone pressed to his ear. This tall, bald-headed kid, who must have been 230 pounds of muscle mass, was crying like a baby. Overhearing bits and pieces of the conversation, I ascertained that he was struggling with the death of his father. When he got off the phone, I gave him a moment to regain his composure, and then I walked over to him. I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder as I spoke.

  “Son, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. “Thank you for serving your country at this very difficult time in your life.”

  He thanked me for the concern but tried to brush it off, probably feeling uncomfortable showing such emotion in a roomful of soldiers and sailors. I introduced myself and he told me his name was Danny. We chatted and I learned that this sergeant had come home from Abu Ghraib to bury his father, who had suddenly died of a heart attack in the middle of the night, and now he was headed back to the combat zone. He and I got up and walked over to the counter, poured ourselves large cups of some awful coffee, and talked some more.

  “Danny, what was your favorite memory of your dad?” I asked.

  “Sir, that’s an easy one. My best memories of my dad were fishing or when he taught me how to throw a football for the first time.” He smiled and the tears disappeared. He began telling me about the peacefulness of fishing and that he had actually gone fishing while in Iraq.

  Eventually, Sergeant Danny asked me, “Colonel, where ya heading down range?”

  “Well son, I’m going to Abu Ghraib and see if I can help fix that shit mess out there.”

  His face brightened. “Hell, Colonel, we can use all the help we can get, sir. The higher-ups at that place . . . Heck, I never see ’em. I don’t even know if we have any colonels at Abu Ghraib.”

  I was shocked at the coincidence. Out of all the soldiers I might have talked to, I happened on one heading back to Abu Ghraib. Then Sergeant Danny started telling me about how rough the area was, how he had lost some of his buddies because they got hit by mortars, roadside IEDs, or were shot by snipers.

  “Sir, when you get there, make sure you stay in one of those prison cells rather than a tent or a trailer,” he said.

  “Why the hell would I want to stay in a prison cell instead of a tent or trailer, Danny?” I asked. “Even a shitty trailer’s got to be better than a prison cell.”

  “Hell no, Colonel,” Sergeant Danny said. “Those prison cells have a cement roof and the mortars and rockets hit the roof and bounce off. Now sir, you’ll have one hell of a headache from the blast impact but you won’t get your head blown off. Sir, if you stay in a trailer and that son of a bitch gets hit by a mortar, your ass is dead. A mortar will peel back a trailer like a tuna can.”

  “Message received,” I said. “Stay out of the damn trailers.”

  Sergeant Danny appeared to be in better spirits after our two-hour conversation. We shook hands and he headed for his plane that would take him to the military air terminal at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, then to Baghdad via Kuwait. Not long after, I was on my commercial flight to the same place.

  While in the air, I watched the fifty-minute Quiet Rage DVD about twenty times. In Zimbardo’s video, he provides a synopsis of his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. I marveled anew at how these bright, well-educated students transformed so drastically that the experiment ceased to be a simulation and instead assumed real dimensions. The video showed the guards subjecting the prisoners to countless forms of abuse, including sleep deprivation, humiliation, and solitary confinement. They sadistically paraded the prisoners around with bags on their heads, some of the guards even seeming to enjoy performing for the camera. The images were eerily similar to the snapshots taken at Abu Ghraib, the deplorable pictures of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and abused while U.S. soldiers smiled and smirked for the camera.

  I asked a flight attendant for a napkin and found a pen. “How did Zimbardo fuck it up?” I wrote in big black letters. This was my basic question, the starting point. Answer this riddle and you can fix the mess in Iraq, I thought to myself. I knew Zimbardo’s experiment held the keys. I felt that if I could list the primary things that went wrong in his famous study, that would guide me in correcting the abuses occurring in Iraq.

  Drawing on what I had seen in the video and my conversation with Zimbardo, I worked at answering that question, which would in turn help me outline a plan to fix the problems at Abu Ghraib. Scrawled on that napkin, I identified four major errors that led to the harm Zimbardo unleashed in his study:

  1. There was no detached observer. Zimbardo himself was the principal investigator and simultaneously played the superintendent role. He got caught up in the madness. As a result there was an inherent conflict of interest. I had to avoid the same mistake. If I was to be successful, my role at Abu Ghraib had to be clear at all times. I had to stay out of the interrogator role and be the detached, objective consultant and observer. If I were to get court-martialed for doing something stupid while at Abu Ghraib, it would be because I had assumed the role of an interrogator and lost my objectivity, as Zimbardo had done in his role as superintendent. I must be conscious of remaining firmly in the role of consultant.

  2. In the Zimbardo study, he did not clearly define what behaviors were prohibited and what behaviors were allowed. Thus, the “guards” in his study made it up as they went along. The only rule that was firmly stated was that you couldn’t harm the prisoners. But harm was never clearly defined. I would need to review processes at Abu Ghraib, and if rules were not crystal clear, I’d need to set forth new, detailed guidelines.

  3. There was no medical monitor to assess the psychological consequences of the sleep and food deprivation that occurred in the prison study. I would find out what monitoring was occurring in the Iraq prison on my arrival. I suspected not much.

  4. Zimbardo’s study lacked tiers of supervision. The guards were the final law. It seemed as though they supervised themselves because Zimbardo—the “observer”—was also role-playing as the superintendent. This told me that superio
rs needed to be present at Abu Ghraib, and their roles needed to be clearly delineated.

  Keeping these four lessons in mind, I devised five major goals and a plan for turning this misguided train around at Abu Ghraib:

  Goal #1. Do no harm. This is the first rule every doctor learns. I wanted to leave Iraq knowing that no prisoners were physically or psychologically hurt while I was there, and that the structures I put in place would ensure that none would be hurt after I left. I also felt that it was my duty to improve the physical and psychological safety of the Army prison guards and interrogators. It was clear that the guards who observed the torture but did not participate in it were themselves tortured psychologically and harmed by what they had witnessed. They would need mental health care.

  Goal #2: Nobody dies or gets injured on my watch. Keep everything safe at all times and put procedures in place to prevent torture.

  Goal #3: Nobody goes to jail on my watch. Be certain that everything remains legal at all times. Stay within the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

  Goal #4: Be ethical. As a psychologist, never do anything that violates the ethical code of the American Psychological Association.