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28 mai 2004 — Ci-dessous, nous publions un texte du site pinr.com sur une analyse de la psychologie des hommes impliqués et actifs à la fois dans les processus de sévices et de tortures, tels qu’ils sont apparus en pleine lumière, massivement développés au sein des forces armées.
L’intérêt de ce texte, nous semble-t-il, est l’approche psychologique de la question des sévices et tortures, à partir de la question de savoir comment toutes les personnes impliquées ont pu procéder de façon aussi systématique, aussi durable, sans s’interroger sur leurs actes.
L’article est du Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, un scientifique specialisé dans les sciences politiques à l’université de Purdue, aux USA.
By Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, May 24, 2004, PINR
If we want to understand what happened at Abu Ghraib prison, it would be well to address the events and evidence as products of a social relation between those who act and those who are acted upon: agents and patients.
What happened at Abu Ghraib? Was it torture? Aggressive interrogation? Production of pornography? All of those apply, but none of them is sufficient to grasp the events as a coherent whole. What happened at Abu Ghraib was impunity.
The term ''impunity'' became current at the end of the last century to describe the behavior of right-wing government forces and their supporting militia in the civil wars of Central America — Guatemala and El Salvador. It means acting towards a person under one's control according to one's arbitrary will. Impunity means that there are no legal or moral limits felt by agents on their wills and no consideration given by agents to the patients' wills. Impunity is the most extreme form of domination, in which the patient's will is entirely erased and the agent's will is triumphal. For the agent, impunity is intoxication of power.
Unlike almost all other social relations, impunity is completely unilateral, lacking any give-and-take. Trying to understand it by focusing on the patient does not get one very far, since impunity is constructed by the agent — the patient is the raw material for the agent's will. The patient reacts to the agent's treatment, but does not respond to it with even the barest self-determination. Impunity can only be understood through the agent.
The way that impunity works out in any particular situation depends on the will of the agent. One can imagine a scenario in which the agent's will is to honor the patient's will, reversing and nullifying the relation. It is also possible for the agent to decide to act benevolently towards the patient — an extreme form of paternalism. Neither of those cases applies to Abu Ghraib. Impunity there meant agents intentionally inflicting harm on patients. Understanding what happened at Abu Ghraib means describing the structure and dimensions of harm.
The power to harm develops in stages until it reaches absolute intoxication with power, as it did at Abu Ghraib. The primary and constant form of harm, in which all of the others are rooted, is simply holding the patient in captivity, creating the possibility for the free exercise of the agent's will. Imprisonment of any kind is generally acknowledged to be harmful, because it restricts the captive's actions, but it does not lead to impunity if it is limited by legal
rules and/or moral standards that give captives some range of self-determination and some protection of their emotional and physical integrity. As pure confinement by and dependence on captors, imprisonment creates the conditions for impunity and the temptation to exercise it.
The sense of having someone under one's control is the seed of impunity. Captives have already been put in place by their captors and are beholden to them for their survival needs. Their previous lives and social relations have been taken away from them and their effective social identity has been reduced to ''prisoner'' or ''detainee.'' Nonetheless, if captives are accorded some sustenance, privacy and self-determination, they retain a personal identity
through their memories, future hopes and expectations, and their efforts to make the best of their confinement — they keep their personalities and their own interior monologues. Imprisonment by itself is the enabler of impunity, not the thing itself.
Impunity as the infliction of harm begins in earnest with efforts by the captors to deprive the captives of personal identity — to abject them, to render them helpless — not only to act for themselves and to provide for their own subsistence — but helpless to imagine themselves as anything but the captor's raw material. Impunity aims to make the captives understand themselves as nothing but means to the captor's ends, whatever those might be — to render
their personalities malleable, to ''soften them up,'' to drive them to complete distraction from who they once were, so that they appear to themselves as raw, reactive sensoria. Physical confinement becomes body invasion. Denial of the freedom to act becomes imposed degradation rituals. Any perspectives on past and future collapse into an abjected present.
The ostensible reason for the degradation rituals recorded on camera at Abu Ghraib was to make the captives ready for interrogation, to break them down. The smiles on the faces of captors in the photographs show that the rituals were more than that. The captors were exultant, high, intoxicated. They reveled in breaking down their captives. Beyond any instrumental value as sources of information, the captives' abjection was a source of pleasure. Pleasure of the captors in their power. The captives were rendered void of individuality —
hooded, placed in piles, caught in the toils of pain and humiliation. An orgy of power. The face of impunity is the exultant smile of the ecstatic present.
Perhaps “tress and duress” tactics, such as isolation, sleep deprivation, subjection to heat and cold, withholding of food and forced maintenance of uncomfortable positions, can be applied clinically and dispassionately. That is not the case for beatings, sexual humiliation, fear scenarios, use of vicious dogs and the piling up of naked bodies. They are too intimate not to provoke either feelings of abhorrence or sadistic impulses. The emotional essence of impunity is sadism — pleasure in harming the captives and in experiencing the results of the harm in the captives' reaction to it. Impunity includes physical torture and verbal humiliation — it is a total experience that involves the captives' will, sense of self and body; an attack on the entire person across all dimensions, involving simultaneously the whole being of the captor.
Impunity is the ultimate form of terrorism, taking its power from the fear that it evokes in the captives, throwing them back upon themselves with no resources to defend themselves. Apart from the pleasure that it provides for captors, it is meant to destroy the captives' wills permanently and to frighten those associated with the captives into submission when tales of the degradation rituals leak out. It serves multiple purposes, the least of which is extracting
information.
Impunity has been present throughout recorded history and has been practiced in violent conflicts throughout the world in the recent past. At Abu Ghraib it has taken on an added postmodern dimension — the trophy photograph. Not content with the ecstatic present, the captors documented their handiwork in images that recall postmodern scenario photographs that depict staged situations. The trophy shot takes the instances of impunity out of the present, preserving the captives' abjection beyond its actual moment — serving as perpetual evidence of captives' humiliation and as a memento of a peak experience for the captors. No
more complete a development of impunity has ever occurred than this. The American captors at Abu Ghraib did the banana republic armies and paramilitaries one better.
Anyone who has had fantasies of abasement — as victimizer, victim or both — can understand what happened at Abu Ghraib and knows the psychology of impunity from the inside. Some people are relatively immune from such fantasies. Most of the others restrict them to the imagination. It takes specific political and social circumstances to act them out, most importantly a public discourse and official practices that demonize opponents and overstep traditional limits on the will. Such has been the case in the Bush administration's “war on terror,” which has now been revealed as a war of counter-terror, fought with impunity.
[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit être lu avec la mention classique à l'esprit, — “Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.”.]
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