PhilPaine.com

Psy­chol­o­gist Philip Zim­bardo devised and super­vised one of the most famous exper­i­ments in social dynam­ics, the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment. A group of col­lege stu­dents were cast in the roles of “guards” and “inmates” in a mock prison. Intense abus­es spon­ta­neously devel­oped, as the “guards” quick­ly evolved into sadis­tic monsters.

But this book is not just about his land­mark exper­i­ment. Zim­bardo was asked to tes­tify as an expert wit­ness in abuse of pow­er and the psy­chol­ogy of tur­ture dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tions of the abus­es in Abu Ghraib. It was this expe­ri­ence that prompt­ed him to put togeth­er a com­pre­hen­sive study of all the social psy­chol­ogy exper­i­ments, such as Mil­gram Exper­i­ment, which led up to his own work, and to blend it with a detailed analy­sis of Abu Ghraib.

I found a few things to crit­i­cize, while read­ing this, usu­ally when I had some dis­agree­ment with con­clu­sions or with the con­cep­tual cat­e­gories employed, but they do not at all under­mine the impor­tance and util­ity of the book. For one thing, you are unlike­ly to find a more reli­able and objec­tive account of what went on in Abu Ghraib, which was far more hor­ri­fy­ing than what the pub­lic was allowed to see in stan­dard news sources.

The book is an impor­tant doc­u­ment. For me, the events at Abu Ghraib con­sti­tute the Great Divide. At that point, the Unit­ed States lost all cred­i­bil­ity as a civ­i­lized soci­ety and a force for good in the world. It was not so much that the events hap­pened, but that it meant noth­ing spe­cial to Amer­i­cans, and no seri­ous action was tak­en to renounce and reject them. The guilty were not held account­able, the hor­ror and immoral­ity, and the pro­found dis­grace of these actions were nev­er grasped by Amer­i­cans. They are inca­pable of under­stand­ing that all the peo­ple of the world have no choice, any­more, except to see the U.S.A. as a dis­hon­ourable nation, just anoth­er sleazy bunch of gang­sters who tor­ture peo­ple in secret cells, iden­ti­cal to the Com­mu­nists, the Nazis, and all the oth­er slime that has infest­ed the earth. In a civ­i­lized nation, all those respon­si­ble for Abu Ghraib ― George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don­ald Rums­feld, George Tenet, Lieu­tenant Gen­eral Ricar­do Sanchez, Major Gen­eral Geof­frey Miller, and numer­ous shad­owy fig­ures in the C.I.A. would be put on tri­al for trea­son. But none of these peo­ple has been pun­ished. That is the choice that Amer­i­cans have made, and they must live with the rep­u­ta­tion that his­tory has in store for them.