--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm a bit disturbed that Rumsfeld, just now, appears > to have been shocked > as I have, and as you haven't. My shock was > partially based on the > assumption that the US occupation force was > competent enough to provide as > good a prison environment as possible. I expected > there to be good > supervision, and for treatment to be > exemplary...mainly because it is very > much in our self interest to do so.
Well, my lack of shock was more based on a (very) cynical opinion of how organizations react under stress, and an equally low opinion of how bad prison conditions are in the US. From what I could see, it looked like the Stanford Prison Experiment run in real life - but given what happened in that experiment, nothing we saw was all _that_ suprising. > She is not some private, she is a general. To be fair, she also has a very high incentive to claim that she was unable to succeed in her position, whether or not that was the case. > > Americans who > > commit atrocities are, and should be, punished for > > their crimes. There is _nothing_ more important > > facing the American military's justice system > > right now. > > I agree with that. I know that you are strongly > pro-military, and that > part of being pro-military is that you hold the > military to high standards. > > One of the things that bothers me is that the senior > leadership in Defense > should have known about the high risk of prisoner > abuse and should have > taken significant steps to minimize the possibility. Yes. Clearly this was a massive screw-up. My guess is that this is one of the things that people just don't think about. Historically the human rights record of American soldiers is exemplary - for example, the reported incidents of problems caused by American soldiers in Somalia versus those of _other NATO units_ was orders of magnitude lower. Similarly in other units (this from a discussion with Charlie Moskos of Northwestern). There was, for example, no equivalent of the incredible brutality shown by an elite Canadian paratrooper regiment (IIRC). A lot of people (myself included) credited this to the higher rate of integration of women into the American military, on the theory that men tend to act more decently in front of women and that women are less likely to suffer from testosterone poisoning. One of the most shocking things here was seeing _women_ involved in the incidents. Apparently we were all wrong. At any rate, in a purely analytical sense, here's my guess as to what happened (assuming that this wasn't ordered by higher-ups, which strikes me as unlikely just because that would be too stupid for words). Some high-value prisoners were probably being aggressively interrogated. That ethos spread through much of the prison. The particular guards involved with this were a bunch of fuck-ups. They picked up that ethos, had no adult supervision (because, at least in part and from my experience with them, American officers tend to have a blind spot about things like this, in part because of their excellent historical record and in part because they're used to dealing with highly competent regulars, not idiots like these clowns, and those regulars would - I'm guessing - never do anything so unimaginably stupid and vile) and normal group dynamic behaviors - ones that we see in experimental psychology all the time - promptly asserted themselves, until you got the atrocity that we saw here. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
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