Professor Presents
Paper on Prison Torture at Belgium Conference
Professor
James Pfiffner will present his paper, “Torture
and Public Management: The Ethics of Interrogation,” at
the conference on Ethics and Integrity of
Governance in Leuven, Belgium, June 2-5,
2005.
The
paper argues that the abuse and torture
that occurred at the hands of U.S. soldiers
at
Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq resulted from
public policy decisions made over a period
of time.
Pfiffner best explains his argument in
the beginning of his paper, “There is no
public evidence that President Bush ever
ordered, approved, or condoned the torture
of prisoners,
yet he and other officers of the United States
made decisions that set the conditions under
which prisoners would be tortured and abused,
as revealed first in the photographs taken
in the fall of 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq and later in a number of official
investigative
reports.”
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A
member of the Army during the Vietnam War, Pfiffner
has a natural interest in the
treatment of prisoners
of war. “If we want our soldiers to be treated
humanely, we must treat others humanely," he said,
adding, “Despite the reality of war, gratuitous
violence is not justified. Torture is seldom necessary
and seldom works. The honor of the U.S. military has
been besmirched by these incidents.”
Pfiffner hopes that his paper will
shed some light on the dangers involved with the
incidents. He said, “The
photos of abuse in Iraq will breed hatred of the United
States in the Arab world for decades to come, and we
must try to deal with what happened and prevent it
from happening in the future.”
While searching through newspaper
articles and official reports that told the unfolding
story of what happened
at Abu Ghraib, Pfiffner couldn’t help but feel
shaken by the details.
“The most striking thing to me was the cascading
chain of memoranda and decisions that set the conditions
for the torture and abuse to occur,” he said,
adding, “The most shocking thing was that U.S.
soldiers would actually do what the photographs showed
that they did.”
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