Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

IN THEIR POLICY FORUM “WHY ORDINARY people torture enemy prisoners” (26 Nov. 2004, p. 1482), S. T. Fiske and colleagues suggest that almost anyone could have committed the Abu Ghraib atrocities (1). They go on to say, “lay-observers may believe that explaining evil amounts to excusing it and absolving people of responsibility for their actions...” Any humane person should react to their “explanation” in exactly this way. I think they make the mistake of trying to divorce “science” from politics in an area where the two are inextricably mixed. There is no mention in their Policy Forum of the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice advised the White House that torture “may be justified” (2–4); that the “war on terrorism” renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions (2–4); or that torture was endorsed at the very highest levels of the government and military (5). Is it really irrelevant that General Miller is quoted (6) as saying that prisoners are “like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you’ve lost control of them”? Why was none of this mentioned? Studying the effect of “one dissenting peer” may be relatively harmless academic amusement, but if you really want to stop this sort of thing what you need are leaders, both political and military, who have the moral fiber to make it absolutely clear that abuse and torture are intolerable in a civilized society. Sadly, the political and military leadership did exactly the opposite in this case. Fiske et al. should have said so. DAVID COLQUHOUN Department of Pharmacology, University College London,Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT,UK.E-mail: [email protected]