How Good Soldiers Became Evil Essay

Applebaum's second argument for eliminating the torture policy is that it constantly enables the enemy to build tolerance for the torture. Applebaum uses the example of “radical terrorists are nasty, so to defeat them we have to be nastier.” This example clearly illustrates the fault within the misconception that torture is ultimately effective. There can also be unnoticed and lasting consequences to torture, that in turn, affect more than the individual country. The global stigma that is labeled upon any country that participates in or allows the torture of wartime prisoners is remarkably important. The public and self image that the respective country acquires, affects

In “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak informs the reader of the situation United States guards caused against Iraqi detainees. Under Bush’s presidency, United States soldiers brought physical abuse and humiliation upon the Abu Ghraib Prison. Szegedy-Maszak briefly analyzes the situation and compares the abuse to further scientific experiments in which test obedience. One of the experiments was the topic of another article titled, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” written by Philip G. Zimbardo. In his work, Zimbardo discusses the experiment he held at Stanford University. A group of male students from the university were paid to participate in an experiment held in a mock prison. Half of the group

citizens, but it was the researchers afterwards that contributed the most startling idea. Zimbardo, the same man who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, said in an interview with the New York Times, “Prisons tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards’ base impulses. It’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches” (Swhwartz, 2004 p. 2). A professor of Law at Loyola University, Marcy Strauss, studies criminal procedure and wrote a forty-two page manuscript on the lessons that should be discussed beyond news articles. Strauss said of Abu Ghraib, “Undoubtedly, these factors [poor training of guards, poor oversight and horrendous conditions] played a major role in facilitating the abuse. Correcting these conditions is imperative. But, to end the introspection there would be a mistake” (Strauss, 2005 p.9). The idea that people could be malignant under specific circumstances has been proven by Milgrams’ studies and this idea is now apparent in real life. Thus, the concern for prisons, as pointed out by both Zimbardo and Strauss, cannot simply be that the guards or correctional officers do not abuse people in the future. The issue is that the maltreatment and indignity in Abu Ghraib was a result of the poor foundation of the U.S. correctional system (Strauss,

The organization of the essay is impressive. The introduction is effective in grasping the audiences’ attention. Mae begins the essay by giving information about the topic. She states that “[i]n 2004, when the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib became known, many Americans became concerned that the government was using torture as part of its interrogation of war-on-terror detainees.” This quote makes readers want to read further into the essay, and it also shows how the topic of essay is

During the Iraq war that between 2003 and 2006, the united states army committed a series of human rights violations against prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Bagdad. The violations included murder, sexual and physical abuse, rape, torturer, sodomy, humiliating and dehumanizing prisoners. In 2004 the abuse that was carried out was exposed by the publication of images that were taken by the soldiers that carried out the violations. This paper will be looking at what social psychology can teach us about what happened at Abu Ghraib.

In this paper I will illustrate how the lessons learned from the Stanford Experiment apply to understanding the dynamics of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The Stanford Experiment demonstrates how social influence can persuade one’s behavior and shape their conformity. The experiment and the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib exemplify the power of authority by utilizing their positions and uniforms to control and overrule the prisoners.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal left a large blemish on the occupation of Iraq and George Bush’s War on terror. As stories of the torture happening in the Abu Ghraib prison began circulating, American citizens had trouble comprehending the acts of evil their soldiers had committed on Iraqis. Some began to see a correlation between Abu Ghraib and the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Though the guards in both situations were brutal to their captives, distinct differences lay in the severity of their actions. Abu Ghraib’s guards were much more vicious to their captives, and this can be attributed to the prejudices the guards felt against their captors, the environment, and the lack of training, compounded with a lack of accountability in the leadership.

She begins recounting the notorious details, how innocent college students labeled prisoners and guards displayed psychological abuse after only six days of confinement, and makes reference to Stanley Milgram’s obedience study and Abu Ghraib, where similar maltreatment, perceived or real, was conducted on civilians by civilians. She addresses and refutes the accepted belief that the Stanford Prison Experiment proved that anyone could become a tyrant when given or instructed by a source of authority. Instead, she suggests that Zimbardo’s inquiry points toward but does not land on one exact conclusion. She explains the influence of the setting, the presentation of the roles, Zimbardo’s participation, and perhaps a sense of expectation felt, all of which can be reflected in the shocking behavior of a few guards. She argues that it should not have been so shocking. Konnikova discredits the neutrality of Zimbardo’s experiment by insisting that people who would respond to an ad for a psychological study of prison life were not “normal” people. However, with her diction and choice of evidence she displaces the study's culpability in a way that ultimately blurs and undermines her claim.

Abu Ghraib Prison was a cruel and inhumane form of torture that occurred during the famous era of Saddam Hussein. Twenty miles west of Baghdad, Abu Ghraib stood as the most infamous prisons the world has ever seen. There was reported weekly executions, daily torture and barbarous living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women were crammed into Abu Ghraib at once. During the war against Iraq, The United States Army took over the prison and committed extenuous human rights violations against the prisoners. Detainees were raped, beaten, stripped, deprived of food and sleep, hung by their wrists and threatened with death all under American control. A famous picture taken at Abu Ghraib depicts an Iraqi standing on a box, in a scarecrow-like

Upon returning the cap, the SS woman orders her German Shepard to attack the frail girl. Rena glances at the sight, “Her bloodied arms flail the air. The dog reaches her throat. Cemented before my eyes, never to rest, is her spirit as it departs, separated from her body by a dog’s jaws on her neck.” (Macadam, 197). The dog is then praised as it returns to the Nazi woman and licks the innocent bloodshed from its paws. This killing displays the ruthlessness executed by Nazi women, as well as the pleasure they seemed to take from taking lives of the innocent. Not only did the soldier inflict physical torture, but psychological torture to those who had to witness and hear the death of their comrade. This directly affected Rena in that she was instructed to carry the girls’ body back to camp; “every step I take, her cries tear my soul.” (Macadam, 198). In comparison to Rena’s Promise, Coco Fusco delves into the use of female soldiers in the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison scandal in the early 2000s. Female interrogators were “depicted in widely circulated photographs” “whose sexualized humiliation of prisoners has come to symbolize the utter breakdown of any pretense the US may have once had to being a guardian of democratic values” (Fusco, 19). Specifically, several photographs of female soldiers Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman surfaced showing them giving thumbs up and smiling over the battered

“Demons run when a good man goes to war.”It is incredibly hard to get a genuinely nice person to become mad. It is even harder to get a genuinely nice person to act on their anger. If you managed to do that, I salute you. Go ahead, give yourself a pat on the back. “Why?” you may ask,well it’s because you, in all of your supreme ignorance, managed to ruin a completely likeable person. So, that pat on the back is not for accomplishment, my friend, it’s for good luck because that charming person will eventually come back to exact their revenge, and best believe that they will have a delightful time in being involved with your demise. You, drowning in your ignorance, completely forgot that the slinkiest, shadiest people are the nice ones, and when you get a nice person on their bad side, well, you have my prayers.

“Six years later [after 9/11] about 355 detainees remained in Guantanamo amid reports of prosecution, ill treatment, mental and physical health breaches, rape, and torture” (Cutler 31). Lidless is a drama that discusses the horrid events that went on at Guantanamo Bay. Throughout Lidless, Alice, a former soldier at Guantanamo Bay, had to perform terrible tasks, such as rape, to detainees in order to acquire information. When Alice returned home, she could not deal with remembering what she had done, so she took a pills to forget. As a result of being a soldier in Guantanamo Bay, her past began to catch up with her and it affected her family, as well as a detainee named Bashir, who was arrested at Afghanistan because of his race. Lidless argues that one’s race effects the

That is why I found Stjepan Mestrovic’s article on the torture at Abu Ghraib to be a reliable source of information. Rather than design an experiment, Mestrovic interviewed soldiers from the Abu Ghraib incident. He found that the military system at the time was created to protect high ranked officials at the expense of lower ranked soldiers: “the military deliberately trains its soldiers to behave like abusive and killing machines, and when that abuse is exposed, it just as deliberately throws accused soldiers into a machinelike legal process designed to produce convictions and scapegoats” (Mestrovic). This argument is backed by the Levin-McCain Report in 2008, which found that soldiers were intentionally ordered to torture and abuse prisoners, and in fact did not act sadistically on their own (Mestrovic). Although Mestrovic’s work comes to the same conclusions as Milgram and Zimbardo, the conformity to authority figures came was forced because of their military system that protected high ranking officials rather than as a result of the banality of

In 2004, human rights were violated in the form of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, including torture, rape and homicide of prisoners in Abu Ghraib. These acts were committed by military police of the United States Army. Did this happen because the soldiers considered the Iraqis as inhuman, and was it caused by having a certain language to refer to the enemies? In war, soldiers find it easier to cope after killing if they know that they have killed the opposing side for the right reasons. For example, when in war, soldiers give names to the enemy to make it easier to kill them. These words are not necessarily meant to harm anyone, but it makes it easier to kill them, and protect the ones back home.

In “Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos ‘Show Rape’,” the writer talks about rape and sexual abused that happen in the Abu Ghraib prison. Many women and men were forced to undress, and even there was a picture of a who was forced to do sex with the male soldier. Mr. Obama believed that these pictures can put American troops in big danger, and inflame the public opinion. However, Mr. Obama emphasis that the pictures were not more painful that what was actually happening in Abu