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Slow again because I stayed up too late again because I was following everybody's links around the net reading all these journals.
Everybody else has had their say about the events at Abu Ghraib. My turn. This is what I'm thinking about.
The nice fellow got us a subscription to Time as part of some kid's school fund raiser. It's appalling, usually -- the bias is so bizarrely permeating and repellent (what do they have against California? I don't get it) -- but there was a reasonably impressive special issue on the recent research into the brain development of adolescents and young adults. There's not much news in the implications: young people take more risks, are more distractable in some ways and more focusable in others, have more facility in some kinds of learning and less in other kinds, have sleep problems, etc. etc. Only now they can correlate these things with documented physical changes.
It seems to me that when we form armies we exploit the physiological and developmental particulars of young people. We take our risk-taking folks and require them to take risks. And so on. But it also means -- we have a responsibility here. We put weapons and physical power into the hands of vulnerable people, and it means we should give them what they need to emerge from the experience as civilized, healthy people. Not as criminals.
Clearly, whatever version of events you believe in, these people were not given the things they needed to maintain what we think of as decent behavior for defenders of democracy(it's telling, but not relevant in this paragraph, that at least two of them were prison guards, which means they were already enculturated in the value system of demeaning prisoners -- prison guards union --). They were given instead, encouragement, permission, justification, pressure to behave as criminals. The justification: they are defending democracy, decency, a value system that honors humanity and the rights and dignity of the individual, against evil people who constitutionally hate, vilify, and dehumanize us, who commit horrible crimes in the name of their absolutist beliefs.
There has been the claim that there were no direct orders to do any of the things in the photographs and depositions. I have a hard time believing this: but I don't need to disbelieve it. "Make sure he has a hard night" is clearly understandable. That these young people went beyond the literal instructions is not surprising, since they were praised and encouraged for doing it, since there was such pride in their activities that they photographed them and passed the pictures around.
The thing I'm trying to get at is that while the defense of the administration is that they never told the prison guards to stack naked men, to sic dogs on them, or to rape boys, the fact that more than one incident took place at all implicates their policies.
It's not "human nature." I mean, clearly, it is in human nature to do these things, because people do, but it is just as much human nature to behave in other ways. The leadership staff is supposed to lead: that means they do things which cause a certain culture to arise, and they are modern experts on psychology and behavior and leadership, so they are responsible for the culture that arises. Even if it is true that they didn't order these things done.
And the evidence is that even that is not true. In their defense, the administration hauls out memos demonstrating that they investigated the legalities of putting prisoners "under stress". What this shows is that they were quite eager to figure out how much torture they could get away with. Eager is the word. Ever since 2001, the executive branch of my country's government has been causing hundreds of people to disappear all over the globe, hiding them from their families, any legal counsel, and the Red Cross, and making it clear that they consider the US to be above international law with respect to defendants' rights and the behavior of our soldiers and "intelligence" people (I can't resist the scare quotes, sorry).
It's as if the administration was waiting with sadistic anticipation for a chance to play out the Argentinian scene on a vast scale. As if they read Orwell and identified with the wrong people.
And they've recruited our sons and daughters to do the dirty work.
And now I have to write a lot in the next hour and a half so I won't feel like an idiot.
Everybody else has had their say about the events at Abu Ghraib. My turn. This is what I'm thinking about.
The nice fellow got us a subscription to Time as part of some kid's school fund raiser. It's appalling, usually -- the bias is so bizarrely permeating and repellent (what do they have against California? I don't get it) -- but there was a reasonably impressive special issue on the recent research into the brain development of adolescents and young adults. There's not much news in the implications: young people take more risks, are more distractable in some ways and more focusable in others, have more facility in some kinds of learning and less in other kinds, have sleep problems, etc. etc. Only now they can correlate these things with documented physical changes.
It seems to me that when we form armies we exploit the physiological and developmental particulars of young people. We take our risk-taking folks and require them to take risks. And so on. But it also means -- we have a responsibility here. We put weapons and physical power into the hands of vulnerable people, and it means we should give them what they need to emerge from the experience as civilized, healthy people. Not as criminals.
Clearly, whatever version of events you believe in, these people were not given the things they needed to maintain what we think of as decent behavior for defenders of democracy(it's telling, but not relevant in this paragraph, that at least two of them were prison guards, which means they were already enculturated in the value system of demeaning prisoners -- prison guards union --). They were given instead, encouragement, permission, justification, pressure to behave as criminals. The justification: they are defending democracy, decency, a value system that honors humanity and the rights and dignity of the individual, against evil people who constitutionally hate, vilify, and dehumanize us, who commit horrible crimes in the name of their absolutist beliefs.
There has been the claim that there were no direct orders to do any of the things in the photographs and depositions. I have a hard time believing this: but I don't need to disbelieve it. "Make sure he has a hard night" is clearly understandable. That these young people went beyond the literal instructions is not surprising, since they were praised and encouraged for doing it, since there was such pride in their activities that they photographed them and passed the pictures around.
The thing I'm trying to get at is that while the defense of the administration is that they never told the prison guards to stack naked men, to sic dogs on them, or to rape boys, the fact that more than one incident took place at all implicates their policies.
It's not "human nature." I mean, clearly, it is in human nature to do these things, because people do, but it is just as much human nature to behave in other ways. The leadership staff is supposed to lead: that means they do things which cause a certain culture to arise, and they are modern experts on psychology and behavior and leadership, so they are responsible for the culture that arises. Even if it is true that they didn't order these things done.
And the evidence is that even that is not true. In their defense, the administration hauls out memos demonstrating that they investigated the legalities of putting prisoners "under stress". What this shows is that they were quite eager to figure out how much torture they could get away with. Eager is the word. Ever since 2001, the executive branch of my country's government has been causing hundreds of people to disappear all over the globe, hiding them from their families, any legal counsel, and the Red Cross, and making it clear that they consider the US to be above international law with respect to defendants' rights and the behavior of our soldiers and "intelligence" people (I can't resist the scare quotes, sorry).
It's as if the administration was waiting with sadistic anticipation for a chance to play out the Argentinian scene on a vast scale. As if they read Orwell and identified with the wrong people.
And they've recruited our sons and daughters to do the dirty work.
And now I have to write a lot in the next hour and a half so I won't feel like an idiot.
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