Le Anne's CNN Moment (2004)

Greetings everyone, I was looking through old files this morning and came across this transcript from the 2004 interview during the Abu Ghraib crisis. It did bring back quite a few memories. I never did get to see the video itself. The other folks they interviewed, particularly the psychologist, are fascinating. Anyway, here's a bit, and the full text is permalinked here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/10/asb.00.html

CNN NEWSNIGHT AARON BROWN
Bush Backs Rumsfeld; What Is on Still Unreleased Abu Ghraib Photos, Video?; Interview With Janis Karpinski
Aired May 10, 2004 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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From New York this is NEWSNIGHT.(COMMERCIAL BREAK)BROWN: The reality of the prison abuse story is that without the pictures there really would be little story, at least not the sort that would dominate the news for more than a week and counting.The military announced in January that an investigation was underway and, while it was reported here and reporters were working on it, the story didn't really stick. Tonight more evidence that without the pictures there would be little fuss. The Red Cross has been complaining about serious and systemic abuse at the prison since the beginning.Here's CNN's Ben Wedeman.(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)BEN WEDEMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Soon after U.S. forces reopened Abu Ghraib Prison last summer, Iraqis began to claim abuse of detainees was common. The Red Cross, Amnesty International, local Iraqi human rights groups and activists urged the coalition to investigate those claims.Last month, Abdel Basset al-Turki resigned in frustration from his post as Iraq's Human Rights Minister. He tells of meetings with senior coalition officials, including Chief Administrator Paul Bremer, during which he raised concerns over torture and abuse in American-run prisons in Iraq. The response, "I believe it was indifference combined with disregard" he told me. "Coalition officials were much more interested in documenting human rights violations under Saddam than in what has happened since" he says. Leanne Clausen of Christian Peacemakers tried working with the coalition to ensure proper treatment of prisoners.

LEANNE CLAUSEN, CHRISTIAN PEACEMAKERS: Coalition officials on the whole they were very cordial but they were generally not helpful. They either said that there really was not a problem within the system, that they were following all the Geneva Conventions that they felt obliged to follow.WEDEMAN: A confidential report from the Red Cross, leaked to "The Wall Street Journal" indicate the group's concerns over mistreatment go back more than a year and aren't limited to Abu Ghraib.

NADA DOUMANI, INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE RED CROSS: The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not individual cases. Unfortunately, this looks more like it was a pattern and it has been occurring in other places too.WEDEMAN: Coalition spokesmen insist they were listening all along.DAN SENIOR, COALITION SPOKESMAN: But I can tell you when these complaints were raised and we looked closely at them, we pursued improvement of the situation, correction of any problems. This is something that's been going on that everyone has been involved with for a number of months.

WEDEMAN: Scant satisfaction for those who wait every day outside Abu Ghraib in the heat and dust for news of those inside or for detainees pictured in those now infamous photos.(on camera): The consensus among human rights activists is that the U.S.-led coalition was unwilling to take their concern seriously until those photos emerged from behind these walls. And now with the abuse scandal snowballing they can only say we told you so.Ben Wedeman, CNN, outside Abu Ghraib Prison.

(END VIDEOTAPE)BROWN: Back now to an aspect of the story that we've all had a hard time reconciling over the past couple of weeks. How do people who seem just like anybody else do what the pictures show them doing and, if they were ordered to do what they did, what made it so hard for them to say no?Reports are only two refused. Of all the people who were at the prison only two said no. Nearly 33 years ago, Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University conducted an experiment that at the very least has an eerie resonance with the news of today.The professor is recent past president of the American Psychological Association. He's been a professor at Stanford sine 1968 and we are delighted to have him with us tonight. Basically, I want to try and shorthand this. You set up a prison and you had some students as guards and some students as prisoners and in very short order you learned what?

PHILIP ZIMBARDO, PSYCHOLOGIST: Well, we had set up a prison to run for two weeks and I had to terminate it after six days because it was out of control. What's really critical and I think the parallel with the Iraqi prison is that we knew that going into the prison our situation, we had selected boys who were normal and healthy in every way and we randomly assigned them to be prisoners and guards and we put them in so we had good apples to begin with.We put them in this bad barrel of prison and what came out were corrupted young men. In our prison the parallels were our guards stripped the prisoners naked, put bags over their heads, exactly as in Abu Ghraib, enforced sleep deprivation. These are things the guards thought of on their own, had them clean toilet bowls out with the bare hands and it was a gradual process. Each day it got worse and worse, so each day was a platform on which they built the creative evil of new things to do the next day.

BROWN: Just a couple of quick question on what you've said so far. But basically what you conclude is that it is not the character of the individual, these people may all be of wonderful character but the situation itself they are in that determines their behavior?ZIMBARDO: Absolutely. That is the whole purpose of our study was to demonstrate how powerful situational forces can be sometimes to overwhelm the best and the brightest, to overwhelm personality when you're in a novel situation that you have a variety of social factors operating.What was unique about our study we knew exactly what the subjects were like before they went in because we gave them a personality test. We interviewed them. They had no negative background characteristics because we eliminated that and what came out was at the end our guards were forcing the prisoners to engage in simulated sodomy, exactly as in this prison.

BROWN: That's unbelievable.ZIMBARDO: And these are college students doing it to other college students.BROWN: Is it necessary that, I guess it's not based on the study, that the guards see the prisoners as less than human or that they are dehumanized in some way?ZIMBARDO: That happens automatically, yes. You can't do this if you see these as college students. You have to see it as dangerous prisoners. In fact, in our prison the guards didn't allow the prisoners to bathe, so they smelled badly.BROWN: Yes. ZIMBARDO: They didn't allow them to go to the toilet. They had buckets in their cells so they urinated, defecated in this so the whole place smelled terrible and the guards began to think of the prisoners as animals, exactly as in the Iraqi prison where some of the guards reputedly said look at these animals. Look at the terrible things they're doing.

BROWN: Just one more quick question, is it, does it have to be a group? Does the fact that there is a group at play help determine the behavior?ZIMBARDO: Yes. It very rarely happens when it's an individual. Where you have a group, you have group camaraderie. You have new group norms about -- that determine what is acceptable, what is appropriate and then the group puts pressure on one another.You also typically have one or two people who lead the way. We call that social modeling. They're going to display, you know, the kinds of things that are now acceptable in that situation.The other thing that happened in the Iraqi situation is you have a veil of secrecy, which actually cloaks all prisons, so nobody knows on the outside what's happening. Once the people inside know that they know they can get away with anything, including "getting away with murder" because there's no accountability.

BROWN: Professor, it was fascinating 33 years ago. It remains fascinating today. Thank you, sir. It's good to talk to you.ZIMBARDO: Thank you and I hope the message gets carried to the public.BROWN: It just did. Thank you, sir, very much.ZIMBARDO: You're welcome.BROWN: Coming up tonight on the program something we've heard a lot from viewers, why show these pictures at all? Jonah Goldberg joins us to talk about that.And next the power of pictures down through the years, we'll take a break first.This is NEWSNIGHT.(COMMERCIAL BREAK)