Crimes of Obedience

To say the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal damaged the US image in the Middle East is to underestimate its impact. While the commissions and trials thus far have not found fault with senior officials, and the Secretary of Defense identified the fault as lying with “a few bad apple MPs,” this paper suggests that the three conditions identified by Kelman and Hamilton in their study of the My Lai massacre as being requisite for sanctioned massacres—authorization, routinization, and dehumanization—were present. There is persuasive evidence that the actions by low level military personnel (MPs) were authorized and approved by higher authorities to produce positive interrogation results, even though not specifically ordered, that what they did was experienced by them as not out of the ordinary, and that there was a lack of empathy for their charges. Moreover, interrogation practices targeting the humiliation of Muslims demonstrated a cultural sophistication at senior levels. It is critical in conducting the war against terror that we not adapt the techniques of terror ourselves and in so doing weaken our democracy.