The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

Chapter 16 of The Lucifer Effect describes how the Abu Ghraib abuses were shaped by systemic forces as well as situational conditions. Although the U.S. legal system isn't equipped to convict systems and situations, you can use this Virtual Voting Booth to judge four leaders who approved of the policies on which the abuse and torture were based: George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush. The charges for each leader are taken from public documents and analyses by Human Rights Watch (for a fuller treatment, see Chapter 16). View poll results here.

George Tenet

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Before the Iraq War, Former CIA Director George Tenet reportedly told President Bush that the evidence for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk case." According to Human Rights Watch, Tenet specifically authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to torture detainees by “waterboarding” (the near drowning of a suspect) and withholding medicines. Other alleged CIA tactics include feigning suffocation, "stress positions,” light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and making detainees believe they were in the hands of foreign governments known to routinely torture.
Under Director Tenet, the CIA also “rendered” detainees to other governments that tortured them in secret locations. These detainees were given no legal recourse or contact with the outside world. Instead, they were held in long-term incommunicado detention and have effectively been “disappeared.”
The independent investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib by U.S. Generals Fay and Jones concluded that, “CIA detention and interrogation practices led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency cooperation and an unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib.” The CIA, under George Tenet’s direction operated under its own rules and beyond the rule of U.S. law.


		Faces of the Enemy What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, even to kill them? It requires a ‘hostile imagination,’ a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.”