Long Flight to Hell
April 2004
Almost a year had passed since I departed Gitmo in May 2003 and returned to Walter Reed. My wife and I were living at Fort Meade, Maryland, which is the lush military housing area for senior officers assigned to Walter Reed. Springtime at Fort Meade arrived on a Sunday in April 2004. The sun was bright and I could see early signs of spring in the budding trees and lawn emerging from the melting snow. The soft chill in the air coupled with the comforting heat from my brick fireplace somehow seemed to quiet my usually active house. I was determined to be a recluse on this day. My wife was away for a conference, and my chores were done by about 10 a.m. After a slow four-mile run at the track at Fort Meade, I found myself on the sofa drifting off to sleep while CNN faded away in the background. Oddly, my thoughts found passage again to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I sighed, tried to put these memories aside, and wondered if my duties would ever call me to such a place again. I thought not, as I sank into a two-hour sleep.
I awoke abruptly to a reporter’s voice, seemingly loud even though the TV’s sound was but a whisper. The volume and urgency in his voice spiraled up, signaling more than just the routine report to fill time on CNN. I turned my head and saw the first images of a horrible place called Abu Ghraib. In my groggy state, I could only make out fuzzy images of prisoners and American soldiers. I arose, staggered to the TV, remote in hand, turning the volume to high, my attention focused—and watched. Even in my half-awake state, I almost felt I was there; I could see the sights and hear the sounds clearly at this diabolical place, even though it was on the other side of the world. At that precise moment, images of naked dog piles, an Iraqi prisoner standing with a hangman’s noose around his neck, and K-9 dogs terrorizing detainees were forever etched in my memory and humanity.
I felt both sick and furious. As I lay back down on the sofa, I wondered how this could have happened after everything we did at Gitmo.
What dumbass psychologist at the prison let this happen? Didn’t he read the standard operating procedures I wrote at Gitmo a year ago? I’m gonna track that bastard down and kick his ass!
I nearly yelled out loud as I was thinking what I would do to the lousy doctor who let this happen on his watch. Then I calmed myself.
This has to be a misunderstanding. No American soldiers would do these things. Tomorrow I’ll call Colonel Banks and get to the bottom of this debacle. There’s got to be some kind of explanation.
The exhaustion and fatigue that was a constant state of being from working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center engulfed me again. It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, these TV images were a part of a dream fog that is common in early hypnogogic states while awakening.
What the hell . . . Maybe I’m just dreaming.
I put the CNN report out of my mind and fell back into a deep sleep.
When I woke up again, CNN was still on and they were still talking about Abu Ghraib. It wasn’t a dream. On Monday morning, at 7:30 a.m., I called Colonel Morgan Banks at his office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Special Operations Command. Morgan was the command psychologist with whom I had worked to get Major Leso some better training for the tasks he faced in Gitmo. Morgan was intimately familiar with the work we had done in Gitmo and the steps we put in place to prevent further abuses. He was a good friend and the nation’s most respected psychologist at the Special Operations Command, but as soon as he picked up the phone, I barked at him.
“Morgan, what in the heck is going on at Abu Ghraib, and who’s the dumb son-of-a-bitch psychologist we have out there?”
Morgan replied in his crisp military style. “That’s the problem, Larry. We don’t have a biscuit psychologist at that place. You and I know what the standard should be, but until now, the leadership wouldn’t listen to me.”
I was dumbfounded. All the possible explanations I had running through my mind hinged on why the psychologist at Abu Ghraib had dropped the ball. But there was no biscuit psychologist? It took me a minute to even process that.
“Larry, look, I can’t talk now,” Colonel Banks continued. “I’m on the run and lots of shit is happening, but I do need to talk to you. I’ll be coming to town real soon, and I’ll call you when I get to D.C.”
There was a pause on the line. Then Colonel Banks added, “Larry, some shit is about to hit the fan over this thing. I’ll be in town for some Senate committee hearing.”
I felt bad for my friend having to deal with this growing mess, but a big part of me was just happy that it wasn’t me. Over the next month, my time at Walter Reed accelerated like gas on a barn fire. I had recently learned that I was being reassigned to Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii—a respite from the East Coast, I naively thought. I had been at Walter Reed for five years, and knowing that I’d be heading to Hawaii was not only welcome news for me, but for my lovely wife, Janet. I had been the chief of Walter Reed’s Psychology Department for five years. I was burned out and needed the tranquillity of Hawaii. The simplest matters of one’s day were difficult stuff at Walter Reed, and I was psychologically spent. I felt I had done my share of hard work in recent years and was looking forward to some time on the beach with my wife.
As my wife and I headed toward our departure date in the beginning of May, the headlines were dominated by more pictures and reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib. As it became a commonplace story on the news each night, I worked to distance myself from the tragedy.
Don’t get yourself wrapped up in this, Larry, I told myself. This is somebody else’s task. Let them deal with it.
I foolishly thought that somehow, this would work itself out without me. I could escape to the paradise of Hawaii—my tropical psychological home. I had survived Walter Reed and a tour at Gitmo. My duty was done, and my wife and I were ready to move on.
On Thursday, May 6, 2004, we had only four days before I left for my new Hawaiian post. That day, the phone rang at my office in Walter Reed. It was Colonel Banks. We engaged in the type of conversation that senior military officers reserve for discussing sensitive information on an unsecured phone line. These conversations were similar to a chat with Sergeant Joe Friday of the old Dragnet TV series—just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.
“Larry, are you gonna be in town this weekend? Man, I really need to talk to you.”
My thoughts were elsewhere as I glanced at pictures of Bellows Air Force Station beach in Hawaii, my granddaughter who lives in Hawaii, and the ocean. I was going to be there so very soon. For a second, I almost forgot I was on a serious phone call. I snapped back into it, “Morgan, you can just call me on my cell anytime.”
“No, man,” he stressed, “I need to talk to you in person. I’ll call you at home this weekend.”
Clearly, the unsecured phone line he was on would not allow him to detail the seriousness of the issues. But I could tell from the tone of his voice that he had a real mess on his hands and needed some help.
On Saturday, May 8, I attended to the details of moving 22,000 pounds of furniture (why the hell did we need so much furniture? I wondered to myself), two cars, and all of our worldly possessions 10,000 miles from D.C. to Hawaii. On Sunday, my wife and I decided to take the train to Union Station in Washington, D.C., one last time before we flew to Hawaii. Even though I longed to experience the peacefulness of Hawaii again, I had already started to miss the unique aspects of the District. While downtown, we walked to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, one of our favorite sites in D.C. On this gorgeous blue-sky day, my wife and I wanted to just stroll along the Mall, visit the souvenir booths, and experience the life of this great city before leaving. We were eager to go back to Hawaii, but we would miss this home too.
Unknown to me at the time, Colonel Banks was already in town for the Department of Defense inspector general committee meeting on Abu Ghraib that he had mentioned on the phone. Later this would become known as the Taguba report, after Major General Taguba, the officer in charge of the team that went in to evaluate Abu Ghraib. At exactly 1 p.m. that Sunday afternoon—just as I was heading up the stairs to the museum—my cell phone rang. It was Banks.
“Larry, where are you?” he said urgently. “General Miller wants you in Abu Ghraib. He needs your help to fix the mess. Larry, I need to talk with you ASAP.”
My heart sank. Instantly I began to see clear images of Gitmo all over again. “Morgan, can’t we just talk now on the phone?” I asked.
“Larry, this is a conversation we need to have in person. Where are you right now?”
I answered as much for my wife’s sake as for mine. “I’m with my wife, and we’re at the Smithsonian, the Museum of Natural History.” I was hoping he would tell me to just enjoy the afternoon with my wife and he’d get back to me later.
“No shit, Larry,” Morgan shot back. “Are you kidding me? I’m on the second floor with my wife. I’ll meet you outside of the museum’s main entrance in fifteen minutes.”
Only in D.C., I thought, shaking my head at the coincidence. At 1:30 p.m. on the steps of the Smithsonian, I spotted the colonel. Even when he was in civilian clothes, a blind man could see that Morgan Banks was a Green Beret and a soldier to the core. From the moment he shook your hand you knew the situation and the plan; he always reminded me of Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen. Without wasting any time, Colonel Banks laid out the horror of Abu Ghraib, the details that an unsecured phone line would not allow to be shared.
“Larry, it’s a fuckin’ shit mess at this place. We learned at Gitmo that we needed to have a psychologist in place the next time around. Well, man, they fucked this up good.”
He paused, then continued. “Larry, you need to read the General Taguba inspector general report ASAP. There is a declassified version you can download off of CNN. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: they have had poor leadership, poor facilities, and piss-poor supervision.”
I couldn’t get the classified version because 99.99 percent of all computers in military hospitals have unsecured computers and unsecured phone lines. Banks explained that I was a “by name” request from Major General Miller, my old boss in Gitmo, to deploy to Abu Ghraib to put procedures in place to fix these problems. Major General Miller had once said that I was the best operational psychologist in the Army and that he trusted me. This wasn’t a matter of me simply being named a good candidate; Major General Miller had specifically said I was the one person who could and should go fix this fuckup in Abu Ghraib. Twenty or thirty years earlier in my career, I would have relished being singled out for such an honor, but now I could only focus on the practical side of what it meant for me and my wife.
“Will you take the assignment, Larry?” Colonel Banks asked me. “You need to be there soon.”
“Of course, yes,” I said.
But I still was not getting the picture. My innocent thought was: I’ll fly to Hawaii, and I’ll have three to six months to buy a home, get my wife settled, relax, and then go to Abu Ghraib.
Colonel Banks thanked me, we shook hands, and he asked me to give him a call when I arrived in Hawaii.
As soon as the official business with Colonel Banks was complete, I joined back up with my wife, and we visited the Smithsonian Asian Art and African American museums, just like any other couple enjoying a Sunday afternoon jaunt in downtown D.C. Military husbands and wives have a way of compartmentalizing worry, fear, and the normal emotions that paralyze most couples, so we spoke little about my conversation with Colonel Banks and what it would mean for us.
The next morning, Janet and I boarded a United Airlines plane out of Reagan National Airport to Honolulu and headed west for what we thought would be a needed break. We arrived in Honolulu late that Monday night and were greeted by our son and granddaughter and a close family friend at the airport. How I had longed over these long five years at Walter Reed to be with my son and my granddaughter again! My three-year-old granddaughter held a striking resemblance to my son. Her intense brown eyes, engaging laugh, affection for all living things around her, and energy would capture the hearts of many. We went to Anna Miller’s All Night Restaurant and had breakfast. My granddaughter sat on my lap the entire time and must have said my name fifty times. My son, as usual, lamented the many problems with his antique cars, spoke excitedly of his new job, and told us of the splendor of now being a college graduate. I couldn’t have been happier.
I reported for duty bright and early the next morning, May 11, at 7:30 a.m. I had no downtime to get my bearings, but that was okay. At least I was in Hawaii again. On the way to my office I met my secretary, whom I knew from my earlier work at the hospital, in the hallway. I expected to exchange some pleasantries. But instead she looked at me strangely.
“Colonel James, we’re surprised to see you,” she said. Her voice was tinged with an unusual seriousness, as if she were worried. “You’re not supposed to be here . . .”
“Ms. Judy, what on earth are you talking about?” I asked.
The look on her face was growing more and more serious. “Colonel, you have orders on your desk that say you should have been at a place in Iraq called Abu-something by yesterday. We thought you must be there already.”
The blood drained from my head. Awww shit . . . I stumbled into the office of the chief psychologist, the officer I came to Hawaii to replace, and demanded an explanation. “What in the heck is going on?”
Meeting my forceful language with his own, he replied, “Larry, you need to call Colonel Banks ASAP. All hell has broken loose up on the Hill with this Abu Ghraib thing and Congress wants it fixed now!!”
Dazed by the sudden acceleration, I could only think over and over how I had naively counted on three to six months before I headed down range to Iraq. I found a phone, called Colonel Banks, and informed him that I felt a tad misled.
“Morgan,” I said, trying hard to keep my voice light, “you have a new definition of the word ‘soon.’ You just talked with me yesterday about this.” He briefed me on the urgency, how the pressure on President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was mounting and the Army needed to send me there to put a plan in place posthaste. The colonel reminded me that, regardless of what either the president or Rumsfeld wanted, it was the right moral thing to put procedures in place quickly so that the abuses would never occur again. I couldn’t argue with that.
I made some phone calls to get more details. In between each call, I dialed my wife, but hung up before the call went through. This talk with my soul mate of thirty years needed to be in person. I realized that the loneliness of being away from her had already begun to haunt me deep in my soul.
My wife was a seasoned veteran of the madness of military life and I knew she would roll with this latest punch just as she had done many times in years past. But we both would later learn that this deployment would try and test both of our souls in ways we had never experienced before. As I walked into our hotel room, even before I spoke, she knew something was amiss. She saw an intense seriousness, perhaps the death stare all soldiers have in their eyes when they know their pending duties may be their last journey in life. She already knew I was going to this faraway, wretched place, but like me, she hadn’t realized it would come this soon. She also knew this deployment was different and the perils were greater. Unlike any previous field assignment, I was heading right into a hot combat zone where American servicemen and women were dying every day. Though we never spoke of this possibility, she knew that she might never see me again.
Yet, after I told her the news of the imminent deployment, she came through as strongly as I expected. It was like watching her change the tire on that little car again. She looked at me with determined eyes.
“Not a problem,” she said. “I’ll stay in the hotel for a few months until we close on a house. But Larry, there’s more we need to talk about. Mary was notified this morning that her Hawaii Army Reserve unit is deploying in June. That’s less than one month away.”
Mary was my son’s ex, the mother of our gorgeous three-year-old granddaughter. She was a personnel clerk in her reserve unit and her deployment meant that our granddaughter would be staying with us until Mary returned. Now that I was going to be away, that meant that my wife would be living in a hotel with our granddaughter. All of our furniture and the two cars were on a slow boat across the Pacific, and her entire social network was on the East Coast. Janet had so much on her shoulders, and yet she managed to stand tall.
Later that day, when I returned to my office, I received an e-mail from Dr. Philip Zimbardo saying he wanted to meet with me when he came to Honolulu to lecture at the University of Hawaii. Zimbardo was considered perhaps the most famous psychologist alive, best known for his studies on how good people turn evil—most notably demonstrated through his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. In this study, discussed in psychology classes throughout the world, he divided young men into prisoners and prison guards to demonstrate the powerful situational forces on individual behavior. Zimbardo found that even good people, when put into positions of authority under certain circumstances, can become abusive and lose all restraint. I had already been thinking that Zimbardo’s experiment, and what he learned from it, would prove useful in helping me fix what was wrong at Abu Ghraib. So his call, and his upcoming trip, turned out to be serendipitous. I needed to craft a plan in a hurry to stop the craziness as soon as my Black Hawk helicopter touched down at the Abu Ghraib compound. There was little time for literature searches and committees with my academic colleagues; both activities would occupy my time and would be futile efforts. I knew that Phil had lots of real-life information to share from his prison study. Hell, even he had gotten caught up in the madness of his experiment gone wrong, so he could speak from experience, not just as an observer. I needed to pick Zimbardo’s brain about what went wrong with his prison project, and how he would do the study differently to prevent abuses. Perhaps, I thought, this might help us down the road in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.
Zimbardo came to town that very week. We met and discussed what went wrong in his study. From what I already knew of Abu Ghraib, the situation there seemed to have a lot in common with Zimbardo’s experiment. In both cases, what started as a legitimate, necessary endeavor—supposedly with controls in place to protect the participants—went very, very wrong. Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment when the college boys assigned to act as prison guards became abusive—and when he realized that in his role as the prison “superintendent” he was condoning it. Something similar was happening in Abu Ghraib, I suspected, and I needed Zimbardo to guide me in the right direction.
I met up with Zimbardo for breakfast early one morning at a sidewalk café right in the heart of downtown Waikiki, Honolulu. Phil and I ate pastries and drank strong Italian coffee while we discussed what he had heard about Abu Ghraib and the unclassified intel I knew about the situation.
The timing could not be more perfect, I kept thinking.
Zimbardo, a tall, dark-haired, handsome man, had a gift for telling long stories filled with moral dilemmas and a concern for social justice, the same as myself. He had traveled the world many times over and had volumes of knowledge in his head about what had gone wrong at many prisons around the world. I was but a rookie compared to his skills. I wasn’t interested in the gory stories and the big picture of torture. Rather, I was curious about the early signs of abuse and how it would lead to outright torture. After some friendly chat to catch up with each other, I got right to it.
“Phil, tell me about your study at Stanford, your prison project. How did things get so fucked up so quickly?” I asked. I was searching for whatever I could to help me in my mission at Abu Ghraib.
In his Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, the goal was to assess the effects of prison life on normal young men. As described on Zimbardo’s Web site and in his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo and his team wanted to test the hypothesis that guards and prisoners tended to come to their roles with certain inherent traits that would promote poor prison conditions—in particular, the idea that people with sadistic tendencies gravitated toward jobs as prison guards. Zimbardo recruited students through a newspaper ad and paid them $15 a day ($75 in 2007 dollars).
All of the subjects selected for the study were normal in every way; they all came from good families, were well-educated and financially secure, and had no history of alcohol or drug abuse or psychological problems—this was key to what Zimbardo wanted to test. Anyone who had a history of psychological or drug problems was carefully screened out. Zimbardo emphasized to me that the selection of participants was very important.
“We wanted to make sure that no one could throw out the study by saying one bad thing about how we designed it because students in the sample had preexisting psychological problems,” he explained as we ordered more coffee. “So we excluded anyone in our study who had any hint of mental illness. Out of seventy-five applicants, we selected twenty-four.”
The “prison” was in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department in Palo Alto, California. Zimbardo explained that he had flipped a coin to randomly assign one group of young men to be prisoners and the other group to be prison guards.
With wooden batons, khaki uniforms, and mirrored sunglasses, the guards looked the part. While the guards could return home during off hours, many would later volunteer for added duty without additional pay. The prisoners wore muslin smocks with no underwear and rubber thong sandals, both chosen to be intentionally uncomfortable. Zimbardo explained that the uncomfortable clothing had a subtle but important effect, forcing the men to adopt “unfamiliar body postures” that helped to disorient and agitate them. They were referred to by assigned numbers instead of by name. These numbers were sewn on to their uniforms, and the prisoners were required to wear tight-fitting nylon pantyhose caps to the simulate shaven heads often found in prisons. A small chain around their ankles served as a symbolic reminder of their status.
Zimbardo briefed the guards before the experiment began and gave them only very simple instructions: no physical violence was permitted against prisoners. Other than that, it was up to them how to run the prison. Zimbardo also told the guards this:
“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy . . . . We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo explains how the “prisoners” were told to wait at home until the experiment began. Suddenly the Palo Alto Police Department, which was cooperating with Zimbardo at this point, showed up and “arrested” them. They were “charged” with armed robbery and after a full booking procedure by the police, including fingerprinting, having their mug shots taken, and listening to information regarding their Miranda rights, they were delivered to Zimbardo’s prison, where a strip-search and delousing awaited them.
The behavior of both the guards and prisoners was shocking. Zimbardo found that even though this was only a study simulating prison life, the guards inflicted extreme abuse upon the student prisoners—and the prisoners took it. The guards forced sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and simulated homosexual acts on the prisoners. They raged against the inmates, humiliated them any way they could, and used isolation cells.
It was clear that the student guards sought to break the prisoners’ wills and leave them with a sense of psychological hopelessness, as is common in real prisons. Zimbardo learned that even though none of the students had ever worked as prison guards before, within thirty-six hours of the study beginning, these “perfectly normal college boys,” as he frequently referred to them, began to demonstrate typical abusive behaviors documented in many prisons around the world. And as is seen in real prisons, the high level of stress progressively led the prisoners from rebellion to inhibition. Within days, many of them were completely submissive and showed severe emotional disturbances.
Prisoner counts became hour-long ordeals in which guards tormented the prisoners with forced exercise. The prison became filthy, with guards often denying bathroom rights to the prisoners. Prisoners sometimes had to clean toilets with bare hands, and guards would remove mattresses from cellblocks as a form of punishment or harassment. Some guards also inflicted forced nudity and sexual humiliation on their charges, The Lucifer Effect recounts. A rumor of a planned escape attempt on the fourth day prompted Zimbardo and the guards to try moving the prisoners to a more secure facility—the real Palo Alto police station jail. When the police department refused, Zimbardo could not understand why his law enforcement “colleagues” would not help him with the escape problem. Still deeply absorbed in his role as “superintendent” of the prison, Zimbardo reacted with anger and disgust at the lack of professional cooperation between his prison and the police jail.
As the experiment proceeded, several guards became progressively sadistic. But interestingly, the prisoners had taken to their prescribed roles just as seriously. During the experiment some prisoners were offered “parole”—release from the prison—on the condition that they forfeit all of their experiment participation pay. But when Superintendent Zimbardo denied their parole applications, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Theoretically, any prisoner could have said “To hell with this!” and walked out of the experiment at any time, Zimbardo told me. But he admitted that, as the experiment actually played out, walking away was not a simple proposition—not in a physical sense and certainly not in terms of the psychological effect on the prisoners.
Zimbardo explained that he thought the subjects continued participating because they had internalized the prisoner identity. Amazingly, this fake prison scenario had very quickly created a prisoner mentality for them. They considered themselves prisoners, and prisoners stay in prison. So they did not leave even though they could have.
But the prisoners were not entirely compliant. In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo describes how one prisoner, Number 416, went on a hunger strike in an attempt to force his release—again, trying to force the release of his prisoner persona, since in theory the experiment participant could have quit at any time. The guards responded by forcing the man to stay in a small closet and hold the meal he refused to eat. After three hours, the guards left the man’s fate up to the other prisoners. If they would give up blankets, the man would be let out of the closet. If not, Number 416 would stay in solitary confinement overnight. The other prisoners ostracized Number 416 and all but one kept their blankets.
With the abuse continuing to spiral out of control, Christina Maslach, one of Zimbardo’s graduate students, was allowed into the prison for the first time to interview the participants. She was appalled by what she found and strongly advised Zimbardo that the experiment had crossed a line. She told him that what he was doing was harmful to the students, possibly unethical, and must be ended immediately. Finally able to pull himself out of the scenario and see it with more objective eyes, Zimbardo agreed that his graduate student was correct. After only six days instead of the planned fourteen, the Stanford Prison Experiment was shut down. In the years since, it has been cited as a classic demonstration of the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support, plus the power of authority. Hundreds of papers have been published dissecting the Stanford Prison Experiment.
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, staring 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 superiors 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.
Goal #5: Improve the effectiveness of the operation by teaching these young men and women how to interview—rather than interrogate and torture—prisoners.
For the first ten hours of the long flight, I focused on these goals, watching the video again and again to look for clues about how to achieve them. After I had firmly established the goals in my mind, I began to ask myself, How are you going to accomplish these goals? I then turned my efforts to crafting my eleven-step action plan. My napkin was getting filled up:
1. Have one boss and only one boss for myself: the commanding general. I needed to be a separate observer/ consultant and not have to report to the commander at Abu Ghraib nor to the intel unit commander. Why was this so important? If I reported to the intel unit commander, I knew that I would lack effectiveness. Reporting to one or two other officers prior to discussing anything with the general would significantly dilute my concerns. Instead, I needed to be a special staff officer who was part of the general’s staff, and who reported only to him. I would request that Major General Miller have me report to him and only him.
2. Be an active, positive influential force at all times. I learned from my tour at Gitmo that I needed to be visible, involved, active, solution-focused, and not blame any of the young soldiers for the previous failures. Bad leadership was to blame, first and foremost, not the poor efforts of the young Americans that I had the privilege of serving with.
3. Actively engage leadership in the work. My briefings on Abu Ghraib suggested that one problem that led to abuses was that junior enlisted men and women operated under the cloak of darkness, without supervision by senior officers or senior noncommissioned officers. I resolved, as the new leader, to become actively involved in all aspects of the mission.
4. Provide 100 percent supervision at all times to the soldiers overseeing the prisoner interviews. I would advise the intel leadership that if a psychologist was not present, we could not do interrogations—plain and simple. By having a psychologist present, the prisoner would be provided a level of protection. In the beginning it might be hard to accommodate this step due to massive understaffing of psychologists, but I intended for it, in time, to become standard practice.
5. Add cameras in all interview booths so that all interviews could be monitored simultaneously from one office.
6. Add multiple layers of supervision. Have a supervisor observing at all times either from behind a one-way observation mirror or on a video monitor.
7. Institute a medical monitoring process to identify abuses. If all detainees were given a brief physical prior to being interviewed, and then another one directly afterwards, it would be easy to identify if any overt physical abuse had occurred during the interview.
8. Perhaps most important of all the steps: Bring on board a military lawyer with expertise in the Geneva Conventions. Interrogations and plans must be reviewed to determine if the procedures and techniques were harmful, illegal, or violated the Geneva Conventions in any way.
9. Institute specific training for all interrogators. Similar to what I had found at Gitmo, my briefings indicated that most of the interrogators in Abu Ghraib were nineteen to twenty-five years old and had attended a three-month training school. The skill levels varied greatly, and as a result I would want to start holding training seminars to improve interviewing techniques.
10. Put clear policies on acceptable and unacceptable behaviors into place in writing. What constituted “abuse” needed to be defined precisely—and not tolerated.
11. Add roaming military police patrols. These MPs would make rounds at the intel facility for the entire time interrogations were being conducted.
My two days at Fort Bragg with Colonel Banks seemed to fly by. I read all the necessary classified reports, reviewed the classified and unclassified versions of the Taguba inspector general report and had several long conversations with Colonel Banks, who was disgusted with what we were seeing from our soldiers in Abu Ghraib but, like the rest of us, was not yet sure how to explain it. He did tell me that, from what he saw, one thing was clear: there was no effective leadership at the prison. He was sending me to determine the details of what had gone wrong and how to fix it, but he was already sure that the photos of abuse were evidence that no one had the reins in Abu Ghraib, that no one was exerting any control.
“Larry, remember, people will do what their leaders allow them to do,” he said.
I thought about that comment quite a bit as I continued my journey. I boarded a plane from the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, International Airport that took me all the way to Germany. There I transferred planes and boarded a chartered DC-10 with four hundred other soldiers headed for Iraq via Kuwait City. As we flew, there was nothing but silence in the cabin. It seemed odd that we were flying into the heart of a dangerous combat zone, where death could await some of us, and most of these twenty-year-old boys and girls slept while listening to their iPods.
We arrived to a pitch-black abyss in Kuwait City at the Air Force Military Air Terminal. It was Zero Dark Thirty—impossible to know the day and time. I glanced at my young comrades and realized that even this darkness was strange to most of them. Most Americans have never experienced the level of darkness found in these countries.
We exited from the plane and a tall Army first sergeant yelled, “Fall in!” All four hundred sleep-deprived soldiers fashioned themselves into a crisp military formation. We remained in formation for about forty-five minutes until the semi truck with our bags arrived. Arranging ourselves in a long line, we passed the duffel bags down the line, stacking them side by side. Despite the orderliness of the process, it was indeed a shit mess. Finding my five Army green duffel bags among the identical five Army green duffel bags all four hundred soldiers brought took three hours. Finally, bags safely in my possession, I headed to the nearby huge tin warehouse that housed about one thousand Army green cots. I threw myself onto a cot, desperate for sleep.
It was hot as hell, despite being 3 a.m. As I dozed off to sleep, I didn’t feel right. It was hard to determine if it was the 130- degree heat or if I was getting sick. Finally, I sank into unconsciousness. The next day, I didn’t feel any better, and for the following forty-eight hours I did nothing but eat and sleep—and neither very efficiently. I was losing my voice but I couldn’t tell if I actually had a fever because it was 125 degrees outside and rising, and everything felt overheated. I had a hard time figuring out if I was sick or just plain miserable from the heat like everyone around me.
From Kuwait I boarded an Air Force C-130 cargo plane into Baghdad. As I boarded the plane I noticed there were three female MPs loading their gear onto it. The tallest of them could only have been five feet. The senior sergeant of the three picked up a .50 caliber machine gun—that’s a big, badass weapon—and slung it over her right shoulder while she carried an M16 and a can of ammo in her left hand. The other two female MPs had a double-barreled shotgun, an M16, and a 9mm pistol on each hip. The crew chief asked me, “Colonel, where would you like to sit?”
“Son, I want to sit right between those three rough-and-tough gals over there.”
“Sir . . . but you can sit up in the comfortable seat, up by the pilots,” he said helpfully.
“Partner, if this bird goes down and we get in a gunfight, the pilots won’t be able to save my old ass like those three girls right there,” I told him. “I want to sit right between those female MPs, and I’ll sit real close to the one with the .50 cal machine gun.”
I nestled in nice and cozy with the heavily armed soldiers and waited out the long ride into Baghdad. A few miles out from Baghdad, at 10,000 feet, the crew chief stood up and yelled, “Don your helmets and vest!” We did, and within minutes I felt the plane pick up speed. I knew what that meant: this big bird was doing a combat approach.
Here we go. This is gonna be some wild shit here, I thought.
A combat approach is used when landing at an airport in a combat zone, and it is truly something to experience at least once in your life. Instead of a gentle, slow descent to the runway that would make your big fat plane an easy target for anyone on the ground, the pilot brings it in fast and furious, juking and jiving up and down, left and right. In an instant, this mammoth aircraft picked up speed and banked sharply at a 45-degree angle in a downward motion to my right, like we had suddenly gone over that first big hill on a roller coaster. It was wicked! The huge lumbering plane was dancing like it had delusions of being a nimble fighter jet. The sailor across from me barfed on the floor of the plane and then started shouting prayers loudly with puke all over his chin. The twenty-eight-year-old pilot leveled the aircraft for what seemed to be three seconds. Then the plane suddenly angled straight down and it seemed as though we were plunging nose first to the ground. Then we leveled out at the very last second and came to a sudden stop. I never knew a C-130 could land so fast and come to a complete halt in so little time. When the plane finally stopped moving, it felt like my nuts were in my throat.
“Welcome to Iraq,” somebody on the plane mumbled amid the groans as we all tried to get our shit together again. I was finally here and now it was time for me to get to work. The hell of Abu Ghraib still awaited me, but now it was just around the corner.