Psychological and Sociopolitical Factors Contributing to the Creation of the Iraqi Torturers: A Human Rights Issue

What kind of people are these torturers? Are they the bad apples of the American military, as the Bush administration has alleged, or is it the whole barrel that is bad, as Philip Zimbardo, former president of the American Psychological Association, declared? Back in 1975, one year after the fall of the military dictatorship in Greece, I received special permission to attend the trials of the Greek military police's torturers. I thought I was going to study sadistic personalities. But what I discovered was a carefully planned system of training. I discovered that these state torturers were probably not dispositionally marked individuals—sadists who thrived on torturing prisoners—but that they were “ordinary” people who, under particular socio-political circumstances, were systematically trained to become torturers by obeying an “authority of violence.” These torturers were made, not born, to torture. The Greek paradigm involved tough initiation processes, physical and psychological abuse, special rewards and punishments, and group bonding in which the pressure to conform is enormous. All these contributed directly to the acquisition of a new, special identity. These young men, who were doing their mandatory military service, were trained to believe, with absolute conviction, in the higher cause of their state-directed mission and to blame and dehumanize their potential victims. This allowed a high degree of disengagement from their past values and beliefs. Only by these means were they able to perform such atrocious acts, acts that were ordered by what I have called the “authority of violence.” These transformations from “ordinary” young men to fierce perpetrators are paralleled in other studies that I and my colleagues have carried out on Brazilian military and civil policemen and on elite special forces training in the US and elsewhere (Haritos-Fatouros 2003; Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros & Zimbardo 2002; Gibson & Haritos-Fatouros 1986).