Abuse of Prisonersat Abu Ghraib

IN THEIR POLICY FORUM “WHY ORDINARYpeople torture enemy prisoners” (26 Nov.2004, p. 1482), S. T. Fiske and colleaguessuggest that almost anyone could have com-mitted the Abu Ghraib atrocities (1). They goon to say, “lay-observers may believe thatexplaining evil amounts to excusing it andabsolving people of responsibility for theiractions…” Any humane person should react totheir “explanation” in exactly this way. I thinkthey make the mistake of trying to divorce“science” from politics in an area where thetwo are inextricably mixed. There is no men-tion in their Policy Forum of the fact that theU.S. Department of Justice advised the WhiteHouse that torture “may be justified” (2–4);that the “war on terrorism” renders obsoleteGeneva’s strict limitations on questioning ofenemy prisoners and renders quaint someof its provisions (2–4); or that torture wasendorsed at the very highest levels of thegovernment and military (5). Is it really irrele-vant that General Miller is quoted (6) as sayingthat prisoners are “like dogs and if you allowthem to believe at any point that they are morethan a dog then you’ve lost control of them”?Why was none of this mentioned?

Studying the effect of “one dissentingpeer” may be relatively harmless academicamusement, but if you really want to stop thissort of thing what you need are leaders, bothpolitical and military, who have the moralfiber to make it absolutely clear that abuse andtorture are intolerable in a civilized society.Sadly, the political and military leadership didexactly the opposite in this case. Fiske et al.should have said so.

DAVID COLQUHOUN

Department of Pharmacology, University CollegeLondon,Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT,UK.E-mail:d.colquhoun@ucl.ac.uk

References and Notes1. The conclusion is pretty dubious, as it appears to be

heavily dependent on meta-analysis, the poor man’ssubstitute for doing proper research.

2. D. Priest, R. J. Smith, Washington Post, 8 June 2004, p.A1 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html).

3. Full text of the Gonzales memo is available athttp://msnbc.msn.com/id/4999148/site/newsweek/.

4. A compendium of relevant government documents:K. J. Greenberg, J. L. Dratel, The Torture Papers: TheRoad to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge,2005).

5. R. J. Smith, J. White, Washington Post, 12 June 2004,p. A1 (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35612-2004Jun11.html).

6. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski said that current Iraqiprisons chief Major General Geoffrey Miller—who was incharge at Guantanamo Bay—visited her in Baghdad andsaid, “At Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisonershave to earn every single thing that they have.” She said,“He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believeat any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lostcontrol of them.”“Iraq abused ‘ordered from the top,’”BBCNews, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3806713.stm.

THE ATTEMPT BY SCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY TOexplain mayhem like Abu Ghraib (“Whyordinary people torture prisoners,” S. T. Fiskeet al., Policy Forum, 26 Nov. 2004, p. 1482)emphasizes findings from academic studieson the power of social context. Just oneexample of where Fiske et al.’s account mis-understands what social psychology reallyhas to say about Abu Ghraib comes from theauthors’citation of Stanley Milgram’s classicObedience to Authority experiments (1).

Actually, Milgram was cautious about thepossibility of extrapolatingthe “obedience paradigm” toreal-life atrocities (2). Heonce wrote back to an enthu-siastic young replicator of hisresults, “it is quite a jump…from an experiment of thissort to general conclusionsabout the Nazi epoch, and I,myself, feel that I have some-times gone too far in general-ising. Be cautious about gen-eralising.” (3).

Instead, Milgram sug-gested that the true explana-tion of evil like the Holocaustwas linked to his experimentsby their demonstration of “apropensity for people toaccept definitions of actionprovided by legitimate author-ity. That is, although the sub-ject performs the action, heallows authority to define itsmeaning.” [(1), p. 145].

Authority figures of gov-ernments headed by GeorgeBush and Tony Blair define what is happen-ing, in Iraq and across the world, as a “war onterror” involving certain nations and peopleswho pose an immediate threat to us becausethey are mad and/or evil and bent on our totalannihilation. The public and the army mayaccept the official definition of our predica-ment unquestioningly, which in turn natu-

rally legitimizes extreme force to be usedagainst our “enemy.”

If U.S. psychologists and scientists aregoing to stray outside of the narrow confinesof the laboratory and attempt to explain theappalling behavior of its citizens abroad, sci-ence is ill-served by accepting unflinchinglythe definitions of “situation” and “enemy”provided by politicians.

RAJ PERSAUD

The Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry,Westways Clinic, 49 St James Road,West Croydon,London CR0 2UR, UK.

References1. S. Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental

View (Harper & Row, New York, 1974).2. Letter to Miss Harriet Tobin, 9 April 1964, Stanley

Milgram Papers, Yale University Library, Manuscriptsand Archives.

3. T. Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Lifeand Legacy of Stanley Milgram (Basic Books, NewYork, 2004).

THE POLICY FORUM “WHY ORDINARY PEOPLEtorture prisoners” by S. T. Fiske et al. (26 Nov.2004, p. 1482) has provoked a great dealof discussion among social psychologists.

Much of it has been concernedwith the seemingly excessivenumber of half-baked social-psychological ideas that can beinvoked, post hoc, to “explain”Abu Ghraib—or any othersocial phenomenon.

However, the skepticalreactions to the Policy Forummirror it in failing to ask amore fundamental question,which concerns the politics ofscience: Why is it thatAmerican social scientistsbecome galvanized to explainevil as something that can becommitted by “anyone,” givena particular “context,” onlywhen Americans commit theatrocities?

The point here is that themight (or spin) of Americansocial science has seldombeen invoked to semi-excuse(in the popular mind) others’atrocities. “They,” these oth-ers, are simply genetically and

historically assumed to be evil or savage.There is a shadow over Fiske et al.’s

paper: The rest of the world may well thinkthat American social science works for theU.S. State Department.

VLADIMIR J. KONEC̆NI

Department of Psychology, University of California,San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093–0109, USA.

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