Newsletter of May 18, 2004

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Preliminary Calendar for 2004-2005 Available
With Civitas' activities for 2003-2004 having just been completed, we have posted our preliminary calendar for the coming 2004-2005 school year. We have reduced the number of high school activities to make it easier for students to participate in just about everything.

We're certain that some of our events conflict with school events. If you notice this while reviewing the calendar, please let us know as soon as possible. This makes it easier for us to resolve conflicts.

Thanks to everyone for an outstanding 2003-2004 year.

Preliminary Civitas Calendar for 2004-2005

Previous Survey Results (New)

Last week's question was:

As the war in Iraq continues to go poorly for the United States and the scandal regarding the torturing of Iraqi prisoners comes more to light, many public officials have called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Do you think that Secretary Rumsfeld should resign now?

a) Definitely 23% (3)

b) Probably 30% (4)

c) Not Sure 23% (3)

d) Probably Not 8% (1)

e) Definitely Not 16% (2)

Total: 13
Additional Comments

Joe Frank
Not only is Rumsfeld responsible, but so are Bush and Cheney. I really hope this drives people to think a lot more about the United States' imperialistic tendencies under this administration. Admittedly, other presidents have done the same, and Teresa Heinz Kerry also comes from a Portuguese colonialist background, so it's not like John Kerry is totally clean either. But I'd like to think he'd do things a little differently.

Buck Hatcher
I feel strongly that responsibility should be placed at some level regarding this atrocity. However, reality says that there is no way at Rumsfeld's level he can be in control over the individual stupidity that was occurred at this prison. The government has more layers than any organization I know of. If the press had not released information about President Bush being upset regarding the communication of the pictures sooner, I wonder if Rumsfeld would have come under such severe scrutiny. Perhaps, but it's obvious from Pres. Bush's comments yesterday that he feels Rumsfeld is doing his job well. I trust the President to know best in this situation.

Anthony Keel, SLUH, 2006
Unless there is evidence to prove that he had something to do with this terrible scandal, I don't think Rumsfeld should resign. However, the military needs to be investigated to find out who is really responsible because someone other than the perpetrators has to be guilty of allowing this abuse.

Abbey Hatcher, Victim of the Office Monkey
Interesting comments by Phil Zimbardo, an eminent social psychologist who did a famous experiment showing that college students quickly assume the roles and "personalities" of prisoners and guards according to their assignment.

Dear Colleagues,
Recent horrors being displayed of sexual degradation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military army reservists elicit direct and sad parallels between similar behavior of the "guards" in the Stanford Prison Experiment against their "prisoners." In the current situation, we must not allow the politicians and pentagon to dismiss the seriousness of what happened with the usual dispositional analysis of a few bad apples in a good barrel. Bush said it should not reflect on the good nature of all Americans or our military.

Wrong. The situational analysis says the barrel of war is filled with vinegar that will transform good cucumbers into sour pickles and will always do it to make the majority of good people, men and women, into perpetrators of evil, where there is:anonymity-deindividuation, dehumanization, secrecy, diffusion of responsibility, social modeling, big power differentials, frustration, feelings of revenge,obedience to authority, lack of supervision that conveys a sense of permissiveness.

This one incident of waton, repeated, dehumanized abuse of innocent Iraqi civilian detainees will haunt the objectives of the Bush administration of bringing any semblance of US- style democracy to the Middle East -- it will now not happen. It is not Americans at our worst, it is human nature succumbing to the power of evil situational forces. The horror is that our soldiers should never have been put in harm's way to be killed, maimed, and now to have to function in situations that enabled them to behave in ways that are a perversion of the perfection of our humanity. The rush to this pre-emptive war was based on lies, false assumptions and political and economic objectives that had nothing to do with WMD, terrorism, or enhancing our national security.

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