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President Bush said today that he was disgusted by pictures of the Iraqi prison is being
abused by American soldiers. Six soldiers now face the possibility of a court-martial
and the brigadier general is under investigation.
Many Americans will be disgusted by what they see and the damage to US interests
in the rest of the world is hard to calculate but it will be significant.
At which point do you say it’s enough?
If there were no photographs there would be no Abu Ghraib. There would have been no investigation.
You can do this, this, this, this. Stress positions, do whatever you want to do to ‘em. We need that information.
You’ll go crazy if you don't adapt to
what you’re seeing.
It was never clear to me what was allowed and what wasn’t allowed in Iraq.
Technically, unlawful combatants did not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.
There's no such thing as a little bit of torture.
Philosophers,
dramatists, theologians
have grappled with this question for centuries. What makes people go wrong?
Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. When I was a kid growing up in the South Bronx
inner-city ghetto in New York,
I was surrounded by evil, as all kids are growing up in the inner city.
And I had friends who were really good kids
who lived out the Doctor Jekyll / Mr Hyde scenario of Robert Louis Stevenson.
That is, they took drugs
got into trouble, went to jail, some got killed.
And some did it without drug assistance.
So, when I read Robert Louis Stevenson
that wasn’t fiction. The only question was, what was in the juice?
And more importantly,
that line between good and evil
which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side and
the others on the bad side,
I knew that line was movable
and it was permeable.
Good people could be seduced across that line
and under good - on some rare circumstances,
bad kids could recover.
So the Lucifer Effect, although it focuses on negative
- the negative that people can BECOME not negative that people ARE -
leads me to a psychological definition.
“Evil is the exercise of power…” and that's the key. It’s about power
“…to intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally
(or ideas)
and to commit crimes against humanity
If you Google evil,
a word that's should surely have withered by now,
you come up with a 136 million hits in 1/3 of a second.
A few years ago I'm sure all of you who was shocked
as I was
with the revelation of American soldiers abusing prisoners in a strange place in a controversial
war, in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
And these were men and women
who were putting prisoners through 0:09:02.690,0:09:05.290 unbelievable humiliation.
I was shocked but I wasn’t surprised because I had seen those same visual parallels
when I was the Prison Superintendent in the Stanford Prison Study.
Immediately, the Bush administration and the military said what?
What all administration say when there’s a scandal:
Don't blame us. It’s not the system that failed. It’s the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers
My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually.
Maybe it was the power that was bad.
But how am I gonna deal with that hypothesis?
I became an expert witness to one of the guards, Sgt. Chip Frederick, and in that position
I had access to the dozen investigative reports.
I had access to him,
I could study him,
have come to my home, get to know him,
do psychological analysis to see to see was he a good apple or a bad apple.
And, thirdly, I had access to all
of the thousand pictures that these soldiers took.
These pictures are a violent or *** nature. All of them come from the cameras of American
soldiers.
Because everybody has a digital camera, cell phone camera, they took pictures of everything.
More than a thousand!