This is the Milgram experiment come to life. Eric Fair was a civilian interrogater in Iraq, working for the 82nd Airborne. The Washington Post published his op-ed today:
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.
Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.
Fair also contradicts the standard Pentagon account of detainee-abuse. This wasn't a problem of a few bad apples, he says. The orders came from people with power:
American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.
While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I'm ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I'm becoming more ashamed of my silence.
Milgram said it best:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
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This is exactly what I have heard countless times from other interrogators who were in Iraq at the time. I was also an interrogator in Iraq, but my experience was all post-scandal; the atmosphere was radically different after those pictures came out. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful that I didn't have to bear witness to those depravities, or make the decision to either participate or blow the whistle.
The connection to the Milgram Experiment is apt, and Fair isn't the first to make it. I've heard it cited by colleagues from time to time, along with the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The sad fact, however, is that even among professional interrogators who have all the training and every reason to know better, the default response is to justify and/or play down what happened. I'm sure you understand better than I do the human need to justify immoral actions with which the subject is associated, but the intransigence of many, but by no means all, of the interrogation community still shocks me.
And the comments on the WP page are sufficiently loaded with Bushoid Kool-Aid drinkers who think that what's wrong is that the USA isn't using enough Schrecklichkeit in Iraq to make something perfectly clear:
The Enlightenment experiment, and the USA people of my age learned about in grade school social studies, are over. Finito. Toast.
I will not live long enough to see the full extent of the coming Age of Belligerent Meatheadism, and I'm thankful for that.
I hope you aren't correct about the Enlightenment experiment, but I certainly fear that you are. Those meathead comments at WP are indicative of that trend, but comment threads so often are. I think the internet's democratization of opinion, combined with its relative anonymity, has opened a lot of people's eyes to the extent to which retrograde idiocy is still alive and well in popular opinion.
But I wonder: is this a symptom of the new cretinism, or would this have been the case no matter when the ability to vomit any crass opinion became so available? The Crossfire-esque demarcation of political discourse into broad categories of Liberal vs. Conservative can't have helped, but if there is any hope, it has to be in the idea that what we're seeing is a temporary blip of oversimplified discourse, rather than a picture of how people actually think. Was it always this way?