This Week in Babylon

Zimbardo on Army abuses, Khouri on Satterfield, and CNN on death squads

Zimbardo: Stave off the “Bad Barrels”

When a well-known university professor proposes that President Bush and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should be charged with crimes against humanity, you might expect the media to take note. But other than a story in the Associated Press, there appears to have no significant coverage of Philip Zimbardo’s farewell lecture at Stanford University on March 7th.

Zimbardo is a past president of the American Psychology Association and best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of nice college kids pretended to be prison guards and prisoners. The project was shut down less than halfway through its planned two-week duration when the guards got carried away and began torturing the prisoners, five of whom suffered nervous breakdowns. According to the article about the lecture, Zimbardo “displayed a grainy, 1971 photo of Stanford's mock prisoners with bags over their heads, guards looking on casually—then switched to an eerily similar digital photo taken in 2003 or 2004 by one of the Abu Ghraib guards, with people in nearly identical formation and cloaks as the Stanford snapshot.”

Zimbardo told the audience that the abuses committed by Army reservists at Abu Ghraib prison resulted from the top-down atmosphere that condoned and even encouraged abuses against detainees. “Good American soldiers were corrupted by the bad barrel in which they, too, were imprisoned,” the AP quoted Zimbardo as saying. “Those barrels were designed, crafted, maintained and mismanaged by the bad barrel makers, from the top down in the military and civilian Bush Administration.” Those officials, said Zimbardo, “should be tried for the crimes against humanity.”

The Satterfield Follies

Rami Khouri of the Daily Star is one of the smartest analysts on the Middle East. Here he is in Doha, writing about the annual meeting of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum: “Last year Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes gave a talk that could have won a prize for naïveté, arrogance, and insult all rolled into one. This year, the task of further lowering Arab-Islamic esteem for the U.S. government fell to David Satterfield, the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the office of the U.S. Secretary of State.”

Khouri summarized Satterfield’s speech thusly: The United States is simply running out of patience with Iraqis, and the Iraqis will have to decide whether they want to keep killing each other or unite behind a national project. The United States had done its best, but all the Bush Administration could do now was serve as a “catalyst” to try to get Iraqis to act more responsibly.

As you might expect, such a lecture was not well received in Doha. As Khouri writes, Satterfield:

also said that the challenge to Iraq and others came from terrorists and insurgents ‘who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence’ (as if the US had not used weapons when invading Iraq). The destruction that might be unleashed around the Middle East, and possibly the world, from the US decision to go to war in Iraq is only now becoming clear. For the US to say that its patience is limited and that it can at best be a catalyst in the face of the furies and destruction it has unleashed is precisely the sort of self-serving double standard that causes so many people around the world to fear and resist the US.

White Woman in Distress: Update

I recently reported on the case of Sarah Wykes, who had been detained in Angola on trumped up charges of espionage. Wykes works for Global Witness of London, which has criticized the Angolan government over its theft of billions of dollars oil revenues. She was arrested last month when meeting with independent groups in Cabinda province, a major oil-producing region.

A number of American senators sent letters of protest to the Angolan government and even Paul Wolfowitz, the former architect of the smashingly successful Iraq War and now president of the World Bank, issued a statement calling for her release. While the American media completely ignored the story, it received a good deal of attention in England, and now it looks like the Angolan government has decided to release Wykes, who had been jailed for several days and then released but barred from leaving the country. According to the BBC, Angola’s prosecutor general has announced that Wykes is free to return to England, although the story cautioned that her family had still not received an official confirmation that she would be released.

Iraqi Death Squads: Update II

This Saturday and Sunday at 8 pm (EST) CNN will air an hour-long report on the rise of the Iraqi death squads. I’ve yet to see it, but as far as I can tell it covers much of what I reported upon last summer. I’m told the report features interviews with a number of key figures, including Michael Karem and Rick Clay, former officials with the Coalition Provisional Authority who provided me with ample documentation about the nasty actions of Bayan Jabr, the former Iraqi Interior Minister who is believed to have played a key role in the creation of the death squads. It should be worth watching. (Alternately, tonight at 9PM Larry King will ask Suzanne Somers about wildfires.)

Why Would a Man Hide his Confederate Flag?

The answer to that question—and many more—from Max Blumenthal’s video report from the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting in Washington.

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