I just left my Violence, Conflict and Human Rights class where we watched a documentary on the methods of information retrieval used in Abu Ghraib. I usually go straight home after, but it’s not likely I’ll be home for a while. I need to process some things that should not be dismissed, and eat some of my favorite comfort food, Chic-fil-a fries. The documentary was not as graphic as you might think, and despite our teacher’s warnings of visual intensity I saw nothing that I had not seen in many blockbuster movies.
There were soldiers that gave their account of the casual decline and orders that led to the less than human treatment of the prisoners. While some of those in the classroom with me might vehemently disagree, I cannot see them as the villainy in the story of those prisoners. I do not condone the decisions made, and I abhor the lack of accountability standards that the soldiers or “guards” held each other to. But I can understand how the slow decline of standards can happen that lead (whether intentionally or not) to grievous outcomes. I can sympathize with a soldier trying to do his or her job, trying to follow orders, and only being privy to information that is deemed useful to him or her. I think I was most disturbed by the soldiers’ description of the numbness that they experienced as they were gradually conditioned to be able to cause pain to a person that they might see daily, and were in some capacity the caretakers of. The psychological effects of this conditioning are equally fascinating and disturbing to me.
There were also prisoners’ accounts of what happened inside the prison. I didn’t expect it, and it didn’t bother me much as far as their description of the torture to themselves was concerned. I believe it was because of the way that they described their own torture. It was as if they were describing a dream that was upsetting, but not quite real. The brave face they put on about their own physical abuse was only unsettled when they spoke of the abuse of others. About the torture of family, of neighbors, of fellow prison mates even, they could not speak without emotion. Each prisoner had an account of someone they knew or knew of who they couldn’t bear to speak of in terms of the pain that they went through. One prisoner, when talking about the physical torture spoke of the inhumanity of being forced to listen to others being tortured. He said during an interview that while sitting in a cell near a prison mate who was being tortured,
“We listened as his soul cracked.”
It speaks to the core of humanity, to the innermost of our beings, they way helpless concern for peers can be more torturous than physical pain. In this same way, the numbness that must occur as a defense mechanism for a mentally healthy person to torture another individual on a regular basis speaks to the core of humanity as well.
This is why I am such a defender of basic constitutionally recognized rights. It is easy to see how a Hobbesian way of dealing with government and large amounts of people in general is such a slippery slope. The Hobbesian way, trading a few rights for the promise of safety or greater good has many ideological flaws. A fundamental problem that arises when you give up rights for safety or greater good is that you are allowing someone else to determine what is safety. How safe is safe enough? How many rights/fundamental ideals must be bent or broken in order to reach that safety? Can we ever expect our government (or anyone else for that matter) to truly keep us safe?
Small perpetrations against humanity for the safety of humanity seems like a circular way of thought, and one of which the human spirit can only survive a finite amount of revolutions.
I think I could write about this topic for pages and pages. The idea of Justice and Injustice is what drives me, and this is a parallel argument I think. I’d better finish my fries and head home, watch some mindless TV and sleep off this heavy cloud.
