Philip Zimbardo has given his farewell lecture in Palo Alto. I was on professor Zimbardo's Stanford site just the other evening reading and taking notes for a piece I want to write on torture from the perspective of the victim and the torturer but I wasn't aware that he was going to stop lecturing until I came across an AP story by way of Ken Silverstein at Harper's
Zimbardo became famous back in the early 70's for what has come to be known as the "Stanford prisoner experiment". In short the experiment involved:
"24 university students randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. The students quickly began acting out their roles, with "guards" becoming sadistic and the "prisoners" showing extreme depression and passivity."
The most interesting explanation of the experiment is, of course, at Zimbardo's own site here which includes both a slide show and written material.
Good to know in his lecture he
"savagely criticized the Bush administration's war on terrorism and said senior government officials should be tried for crimes against humanity."
The professor went on to say:
"abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were not isolated incidents by rogue soldiers. Rather, sadism was the inevitable result of U.S. government policies that condone brutality toward enemies, ... .
Individual military personnel -- those who stripped prisoners and leashed them like dogs -- are only as culpable as the people who created the overall environment in which the soldiers operated, Zimbardo told undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology.
"Good American soldiers were corrupted by the bad barrel in which they, too, were imprisoned," said Zimbardo. "Those barrels were designed, crafted, maintained and mismanaged by the bad barrel makers, from the top down in the military and civilian Bush administration."
The professor blasted President Bush, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials who said al-Qaida and Taliban captives would be considered "unlawful combatants" rather than "prisoners of war," a designation that would invoke the Geneva Convention.
Zimbardo said those officials "should be tried for the crimes against humanity."
[my highlighting]
Contra Costa Times
Rachel Konrad
March. 11, 2007
AP
Zimbardo testified as an expert witness at the trial of Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, the highest-ranking person implicated in the scandal at Abu Ghraib.
"Frederick received a maximum eight-year prison term for abusing and humiliating detainees. He was stripped of nine medals and 22 years of retirement pay."
At his final lecture Zimbardo:
displayed a grainy, 1971 photo of Stanford's mock prisoners with bags over their heads, guards looking on casually -- then switched to an eerily similar digital photo taken in 2003 or 2004 by one of the Abu Ghraib guards, with people in nearly identical formation and cloaks as the Stanford snapshot.
Bush [G.W] characterized the abuse as an aberration. Some high-ranking military officials insisted that individuals -- not Zimbardo's amorphous "environment" -- had to be held accountable.
The reactions still sting the professor.
"I gave the situational view, and, of course, the military totally rejects it," Zimbardo said.
Contra Costa Times
Rachel Konrad
March. 11, 2007
AP
In the GOP, Bush civilian and military world you must be anti-science and you know for sure that only the weak are accountable. Nice world, eh.
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