{"id":65985,"date":"2004-05-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-05-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/05\/28\/un-commentaire-sur-laffaire-de-la-prison-dabu-ghraib-abu-ghraib-means-impunity\/"},"modified":"2004-05-28T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-05-28T00:00:00","slug":"un-commentaire-sur-laffaire-de-la-prison-dabu-ghraib-abu-ghraib-means-impunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2004\/05\/28\/un-commentaire-sur-laffaire-de-la-prison-dabu-ghraib-abu-ghraib-means-impunity\/","title":{"rendered":"Un commentaire sur l’affaire de la prison d’Abu Ghraib : \u201cAbu Ghraib Means Impunity\u201d<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Un commentaire sur l’affaire de la prison d’Abu Ghraib : Abu Ghraib Means Impunity<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t28 mai 2004 Ci-dessous, nous publions un texte du site pinr.com<\/a> sur une analyse de la psychologie des hommes impliqu\u00e9s et actifs \u00e0 la fois dans les processus de s\u00e9vices et de tortures, tels qu’ils sont apparus en pleine lumi\u00e8re, massivement d\u00e9velopp\u00e9s au sein des forces arm\u00e9es.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tL’int\u00e9r\u00eat de ce texte, nous semble-t-il, est l’approche psychologique de la question des s\u00e9vices et tortures, \u00e0 partir de la question de savoir comment toutes les personnes impliqu\u00e9es ont pu proc\u00e9der de fa\u00e7on aussi syst\u00e9matique, aussi durable, sans s’interroger sur leurs actes.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tL’article est du Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, un scientifique specialis\u00e9 dans les sciences politiques \u00e0 l’universit\u00e9 de Purdue, aux USA.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Abu Ghraib Means Impunity<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\tBy Dr. Michael A. Weinstein, May 24, 2004, PINR<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tIf 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tWhat 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe term \u00a0\u00bbimpunity\u00a0\u00bb 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tUnlike 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. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe 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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\trules 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe 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 \u00a0\u00bbprisoner\u00a0\u00bb or \u00a0\u00bbdetainee.\u00a0\u00bb Nonetheless, if captives are accorded some sustenance, privacy and self-determination, they retain a personal identity<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tthrough 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tImpunity 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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\ttheir personalities malleable, to \u00a0\u00bbsoften them up,\u00a0\u00bb 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tThe 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 <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\thooded, 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. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tPerhaps 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tImpunity 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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tinformation. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tImpunity 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<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tmore 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tAnyone 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit \u00eatre lu avec la mention classique \u00e0 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..]<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Un commentaire sur l’affaire de la prison d’Abu Ghraib : Abu Ghraib Means Impunity 28 mai 2004 Ci-dessous, nous publions un texte du site pinr.com sur une analyse de la psychologie des hommes impliqu\u00e9s et actifs \u00e0 la fois dans les processus de s\u00e9vices et de tortures, tels qu’ils sont apparus en pleine lumi\u00e8re, massivement… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}