The blame game

While Rumsfeld plays a surprise visit on Iraq in a further effort to save the Administration from further embarrassment, and US Senators look at forcibly bare-breasted Iraqi women, the media is saying "the situation did it" and not a few wacko individuals (or what I believe, a systematic design to extract information from Iraqis by PyOps via humiliation).

The media is reviving an old (1971) Stanford Prison Study by ex-professor Philip Zimbardo, and having him on as an "expert." Slate's William Saletan and I don't buy it but for different reasons.

Saletan talks about the major differences of the Study's participants and the soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib. He claims that the Stanford students were nonviolent for the most part while some of these MPs had a history of violence (against their wives even). It is also true that many of these folks weren't originally MPs. Many families of the accused abusers say their son/daughter was a mechanic in the wrong place/just taking orders.

Race is also a factor to Saletan, and I agree. I think if the country we had invade wasn't Arab, and the soldiers in question weren't mostly white, things might have turned out differently. Still, the acts that were done, the way soldiers posed, and the fact that the release of these photos was threatened on the prisoners-- all of this points to an intelligent design (to attack the Arab ideals of Manhood and Honor) and not just "Hey, let's do this!" Ad Hoc sadism.

As Will points out, "Prisoners have been photographed wearing hoods; but according to guards, it was intelligence officers who initially brought "hooded" prisoners to them. Last week, the commander of military prisons in Iraq announced that intelligence officers would no longer "hood" detainees, in effect confirming that they had been doing so."

One could compare the media/Zimbardo argument on Abu Ghraib to those about the Germans during Nazism. Why didn't ordinary Germans try to stop Hitler? Some did, and they were caught and killed. Nazi Germany was a prison state, and certainly the situation/environment had a chilling effect on people. As Zimbardo argues "if we can attribute deviance, failure, and breakdowns to the individual flaws of others, then we [as a society] are absolved." But as Saletan points out "if we blame the situation, the perpetrators are absolved, too."

My point is, there may be some real bad apples in the MP system, especially since the military is running incredibly short on MPs (they can't be too picky and they force untrained "mechanics" to do MP work), but there is also some bad policies in place that brings out the monster in some people. PsyOps and those that approved these methods are also to blame for their dehumanizing treatment of Iraqis, as well as the foot soldiers under suspension.