'Worse things took place at Abu Ghraib'
Posted online: Monday, October 03, 2005 at 1140 hours IST
Washington, October 3: A US soldier convicted of humiliating and abusing Iraqi prisoners has said she knew of "worse things" happening at Abu Ghraib and insisted military commanders were fully aware of what was going on in Iraq’s infamous jail.
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The comments, made by private first class Lynndie England in her first post-court marshal interview, contradicted assertions by top Pentagon officials that a small group of out-of-control soldiers were responsible for abuse at Abu Ghraib, and that however repulsive that mistreatment was, it did not amount to torture.
"I know worse things were happening over there," admitted the 22-year-old convict.
She said one night she heard blood-curdling screams coming from the block's shower room, where non-military interrogators had taken an Arab detainee.
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http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=55802
How Psychology Can Help Explain The Iraqi Prisoner Abuse
http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/prisonerabuse.html
To the degree that the Abu Ghraib guards were following orders from intelligence officers as some reports say, another experiment performed 40 years ago by Dr. Stanley Milgram, who taught psychology at Yale, also explains how people can end up abusing others in situations where one person has complete control over another.
Back in the early 1960s, while Milgram was teaching at Yale, he began studying the impact of authority on human behavior. He wanted to see whether ordinary people would follow an authority figure’s orders to keep administering what they thought were increasingly painful and possibly lethal electric shocks to other people. In over a dozen studies, with both Yale college students and more than 1,000 ordinary citizens, Milgram’s experiment assigned the subjects to be “teachers” who were to help “learners” improve their memories by punishing their mistakes with increasing levels of shock as they continued the learning task. The research director, who wore a white lab coat, made it clear that he was responsible for any harm to the “learners”.
These experimental findings shocked Dr. Milgram and also shocked the public once the findings were released in the news. The findings illustrated how someone in charge, in this case a researcher in a white lab coat giving instructions, could cause two-thirds of the subjects to keep raising the voltage levels to the full level of 450 volts despite the screams (and soon silence) of a learner in the next room. Social scientists have learned that in research, when subjects first observe a peer following the instructions completely, they do the same when it becomes their turn. This was the case here, where almost 100 percent of those subjects were blindly obedient to the authority figures. The learner subjects were actually confederates who were not really shocked, but led the subjects to believe they were. Milgram later identified some key conditions for suspending human morality, many relevant to Abu Ghraib:
- There is given an acceptable justification for the behavior, akin to an ideology.
- The guards (or teachers or participants) develop a distorted sense of the victims (or participants) as not comparable to themselves. Dehumanizing them as animals would be an extreme example.
- Euphemisms, such as ''learners'' (instead of victims) are used.
- There is a gradual escalation of violence that starts with a small step.
"milgram experiment"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment