05-06-2004, 11:32 AM
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#88 (permalink)
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Junkie
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Quote:
Originally posted by Dragonlich
Actually, without proper guidance, prisoner-guard relations can quickly turn into an us vs. them situation, which may result in the actions we saw photographed. I think the US military should have foreseen such abuses, given the large volumes of psychological research that has shown the likelihood of abuse in these instances. Furthermore, I think they should have taken steps to prevent it.
I don't think it's fair to turn the soldiers that did this into inhuman villains, as if we're somehow better than them. Research has shown that we are not. (FYI, a study into prisoner-guard behavior was conducted by a US university; a group of normal, regular-joe students was divided into two groups: guards and prisoners, and they would have to play the part for a week or so. The experiment was halted after 3 days, because the "guards" became too abusive...) Anyway, these were young soldiers, just barely adult. They weren't actively being watched by their commanding officers, and there probably was a lot of peer pressure involved.
One way the soldiers might have "justified" their actions: They were in a war zone for months, in fact longer than they had hoped for. These Iraqi insurgents were largely to blame for them *still* being there; they were also to blame for the deaths of their fellow soldiers. If it wasn't for those bastards, the soldiers could have been home already... One can see how such a mind-set, combined with the aforementioned prisoner-guard abusiveness, combined with lack of supervision, combined with peer pressure, combined with sheer stress, can lead to extremes. Calling those extremes "un-American" is pretty silly, seeing that those extremes are just plain human - we are not a nice species to begin with.
(Note: I'm not trying to excuse, just trying to understand.)
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One problem with this thinking is that at least one of the accused guards is a prison guard at home so he wasn't new to the situation and several of those pictured were not "young" soldiers.
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Strive to be more curious than ignorant.
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