CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed a man who professes to be an interrogation expert. This expert says he thinks that the people who carried out the interrogation atrocities in Iraq were probably suffering from "Prison Guard Syndrome". This expert sited a study that was done in the psychology department at Stanford University in 1971 . In this study a group of regular students were recruited to take part in an experiment in which half of the students were mock prison guards and the other half were prisoners. The study was to last for two weeks. However, by day six the guards were getting so sadistic towards the prisoners that those in control of the experiment halted the experiment. They called it prison guard syndrome.
I'll make you a bet that prisoners have a natural animosity toward guards as well, and resent them no matter how decent the guards are and the guards soon feel this animosity and want to retaliate. I think it's probably like the common situation in which one child hits another child and the other child feels that in order to get even he should hit the first child "harder" than the first child hit him, and the situation rapidly escalates from there.
My real opinion of the Iraq affair however, is that the guards were just plain sadistic and faggy. I hope part of their punishment involves being driven in the privates with a rifle butt. This punishment I respectfully reserve only for those who have themselves done the same thing to someone else.
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