An academic at Indiana State University has published a peer reviewed article in an international journal, claiming that the torture in Abu Ghraib has’t been episodic but systemic and intentional. He attributes it to instructions by top officials.
US officials from top echelons are instructing ‘take off the gloves’ approaches in prisoner interrogations, says Mark Hamm in the article in the Journal Crime, Media, Culture, entitled “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: George W. Bush and the Sins of Abu Ghraib.
Hamm offers a new examination of three main theories explaining the prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib. He bases his evidence on 16,000 photographs compiled by the United States Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Hamm claims the photographs provide overwhelming support that the torture was not the act of a few ‘bad apples’, but the undeniable result of CIA involvement in prisoner interrogation.
While previous reports have exonerated President Bush from any involvement in the torture, Hamm concludes high ranking officials of the Bush Administration can be held accountable for direct orders made under Bush’s leadership.
In opposition to both Zimbardo’s infamous Stanford prison experiment, (the 1971 experiment performed by an academic on real students to see what happens psychologically when good people are put in evil circumstances), and the United States Government’s proposed “bad apple” theory, Hamm presents existing reports and records, including Alfred McCoy’s investigations of CIA history and interrogation style, to demonstrate the similarities of such methods to the torture at Abu Ghraib.
The photographs demonstrate a systematic “pattern of torture”, leading Hamm to question the validity of claims these methods were “dreamed up” by the military personnel who the government have labelled as “bad apples” – some of whom are noted to have been at the prison site for only two weeks.
“These were not just ill-trained men in charge of a prison: they were untrained and in charge of a prison,” commented Hamm. “This therefore presented a condition where these people became easy foils to carry out the CIA’s interrogation techniques.”
Hamm also reports evidence showing the approval of such methods from military intelligence officers, CIA agents, and the United States Government. Hamm highlights the contradiction between claims the tortures depicted in the photographs were ‘perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military’ and this approval: “[Corporal Charles] Graner wasn’t punished – he was rewarded for his actions” (receiving an Army commendation medal).
Importantly, Hamm highlights this torture was frequently of innocent Iraqis, who were not held for intelligence purposes, and posed no risk to the United States. He says “This is the most curious part of the criminal investigation: these prisoners who we see in these photographs were innocent: the guards got no intelligence from these people.” Within his article, Hamm adds “Torture has utility for the state only when it induces useful information from the tortured; otherwise you are torturing people for the hell of it”.
The article concludes these photographs amount to a record of the high crime of torture committed by the capitalist state. Records including the “torture memo” and CIA interviews suggest that while President Bush may not have issued a written policy or direct order, his organizational leadership “unleashed dozens of CIA agents to do what they had been trained to do”.
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