More....

OK - I found the sites I was looking for. In Psych 101, you've gotta learn about social psychology and the particular kind of weirdness that goes on in group situations. One infamous experiment separated a group of students into guards and prisoners, stuck them in a makeshift jail and then observed what happened. It was supposed to go on for 2 weeks, and they pulled the plug after 6 days because it got so dangerous. On the links page is a collection of parallels between this study and the abuse in the Iraqi prisons.

The other one, Stanley Milgram's 1963 study, was made into a grainy, disturbing B/W film that we all watched. People were told to shock someone in another room, and turn up the voltage on command. These people heard the (phony) screams coming from the other room, but turned the voltage up anyway because they were told to. I imagine each of us in that lecture hall, myself included, told ourselves that we wouldn't have participated. Keep in mind, these people weren't army officers, sworn to obey. These were people who had been told they could leave the study at any time, and they STILL did it.

Keep in mind, I'm not condoning this behavior AT ALL. It disgusts me. But my point is that those perpetrating the abuse are not doing this in a vacuum. There's a culture in the prisons that supports this behavior and dehumanizes the prisoners. We've got a lot of information about tendencies towards sadism in prisons (not to mention war), and we're supposed to be one of the most advanced nations in the world - let's use that information to prevent this from happening ever again. I think there are a whole lot more people responsible for this than those two taking and posing in the pictures.