The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a social psychologist said on Thursday.
Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo described a "Lucifer effect" as he flashed shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.
"If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse," Zimbardo said to a stunned audience that included famous actors, entrepreneurs and politicians.
"Abu Ghraib abuses went on for three months ... Who was watching the store? Nobody, and it was on purpose," he said.
Zimbardo, 75, is renowned for the 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students on summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the university's campus in Northern California.
The pretend guards grew so sadistic and the prisoners so cowed that the experiment was halted prematurely out of concern for the students.
Zimbardo detailed stark parallels to abuses of suspected terrorists by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and how environment can turn people into heroes or demons.
"I was shocked when I saw those pictures but I wasn't surprised," Zimbardo said of the images he was privy to while a member of a legal defense team for a sergeant charged in connection with prison abuses.
"Because I had seen those cells before at Stanford. The power is in the system. It's not bad apples, but bad barrel makers," Zimbardo said.
He paced the stage as images of horrors flashed on large screens. He lays out his conclusions in a recently released book titled The Lucifer Effect.
"There is an infinite capacity to make us behave kind or cruel, or make some of us heroes," Zimbardo said, convinced that environment dictates the outcome far more than people's characters or personalities.
"The Stanford prison experiment shows the power of institutions to change behavior. We took good apples and put them in a bad situation," he said.
As a witness for a US military police reservist that was a guard at the Abu Ghraib interrogation center when abuses occurred, Zimbardo got access to records and pictures gathered in the case.
The guards were told to "soften" prisoners to make them more cooperative with military intelligence interrogators, he said.
Photos showed naked and hooded prisoners beaten bloody and being made to commit humiliating acts such as human pyramids or simulating homosexual sex. Soldiers posed proudly with battered corpses and nude, injured prisoners.
"They took pictures of everything," Zimbardo said.
A "hero" at Abu Ghraib turned out to be a lowly private that called for abuses there to be stopped, the professor said.
"Heroism is the antidote to evil," Zimbardo said. "Let's focus on justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing."
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
RSS