“So groups of people in positions of unaccountable power naturally resort to violence, do they?” Psychologists Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam write for the BBC that we may be deluded in comforting ourselves with the thought that those who committed the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were depraved monsters and that we ourselves would not have acted similarly under those circumstances. A series of major psychological studies over fifty years, sadly, say differently. Most notorious, Philip Zimbardo’s controversial but sobering 1971 Stanford prison experiment had to be aborted because the seemingly well-adjusted students assigned to roleplay prison guards quickly became sadistically abusive to the students chosen to play prisoners.

So the Abu Ghraib torturers were victims of circumstance, losing preexistent moral standards and doing things they would normally abhor, for example because the prison environment was dominated by the insistent goals of military intelligence and their orders to “soften up” the prisoners for interrogation? Was there something exceptional about this context that caused them to see their captives as subhuman? Where does the responsibility lie for the cultural influences?

Reicher and Haslam liken the photographs taken of the atrocities to the postcards that lynch mobs circulated advertising their actions “proudly and with a grotesque sense of fun”, seeking the approval from their viewers that makes heinous actions more possible. They went so far as to replicate the Stanford experiment for the BBC and, finding that their subjects did not replicate the cruelty and abuse of the 1971 iteration, concluded that the crucial variable is how they are instructed by their leadership. What message was promulgated by the commanders of the Abu Ghraib torturers? What pressure was there against the expression of disapproval or objection? Did the command structure and the military culture actively promote abuse? create a permissive environment in which transgressors know that they will not be held accountable because their superiors will turn a blind eye or file a report of no consequence? or simply fail to promulgate any standards at all, abdicating their responsibility to fill a moral vacuum?

” Our own findings indicated that where such a vacuum exists, people are more likely to accept any clear line of action which is vigorously proposed. Often, then, tyranny follows from powerlessness rather than power. In either case, the failure of leaders to champion clear humane and democratic values is part of the problem.”

But it is not only the military culture but the values promulgated in the society as a whole which should be examined. Anti-Muslim sentiment, the demonization of our enemies, the subtle linguistic cues in public statements by political leaders, and perhaps most important the marginalization of those who would stand against such dehumanization encourages the perpetration of atrocities and the belief by the perpetrators that they are doing a noble service rather than committing a heinous outrage. It is almost indubitable that the Abu Ghraib torturers felt they were behaving well, obediently, doing a service. It is difficult to disentangle the contributions of the individual, group and social psychological influences that coalesced in this instance, but none can be ignored.

“We need an analysis that makes us accept rather than avoid our responsibilities. Above all, we need a psychology which does not distance us from torture but which requires us to look closely at the ways in which we and those who lead us are implicated in a society which makes barbarity possible.”

Those of us who stand against such barbarity need to go further than just condemning the perpetrators and lulling ourselves with the moral superiority of that condemnation. We must take on the soul-searching examination of ourselves and our culture, and we must take it outside the “echo chamber” of the weblogging community on the Internet.

Related: More Rumsfeld lies about respecting the Geneva conventions and the rule of law:

“Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended military interrogation techniques in Iraq today, rejecting complaints that they violate international rules and may endanger Americans taken prisoner. Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that Pentagon lawyers had approved methods such as sleep deprivation and dietary changes as well as rules permitting prisoners to be made to assume stress positions.” —Toronto Star

Also: William Saletan argues in Slate that the Stanford experiment doesn’t explain Abu Ghraib, that the differences are instructive. At Stanford, what occurred was humiliation; at Abu Ghraib, torture. Beyond the context of proffered power and its power to corrupt, the Iraq situation involves racial hatred and the individual psychologies of the prison guards were not as benign as those of the Stanford experiment student subjects. Moreover, the input from supervisors was different. Zimbardo pulled the plug on the experiment because he essentially couldn’t stand the fact that he had turned from a benign psychological researcher into a prison warden, and that gentle and bright students under his tutelage had become monsters. At no level at Abu Ghraib were any such compunctions in play.

But Saletan agrees with me that the primary pitfall in using Stanford to explain Abu Ghraib was this:

The point of the Stanford experiment, after all, was to discredit personal responsibility. “Individual behavior is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies rather than ‘personality traits,’ ‘character,’ ‘will power,’ or other empirically unvalidated constructs,” Zimbardo told Congress in 1971. “Thus we create an illusion of freedom by attributing more internal control to ourselves, to the individual, than actually exists.”

We are about to see, in a range of inquiries about the prison torture, the transgressors blaming the system. We may get caught up in tortuous discussions about which level of the system it was that failed. In so doing, the first casualty will be any notion of personal responsibility. To be sure, you will to hear pronouncements about the personal responsibility of the Abu Ghraib guards — from the government, not in the service of the promulgation of an ethical standard, but merely to deflect the political liabilities it faces. The first casualty of the invasion of Iraq has been the poor unfortunate citizens of that country (yes, Virginia, even in light of the fact that they have been freed from Saddam Hussein). The second casualty appears to be America’s soul.

In what has been hailed as an important step forward in corporate responsibility in an industry beset by criticism for sweatshop conditions, clothing retailer The Gap issued its first of intended annual reports detailing its monitoring of manufacturing conditions at its plants around the world.

It is late, and I wasn’t going to post anything tonight, but this moment cannot pass without acknowledging and grieving the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg, the 26 year-old Westchester PA entrepreneur in Iraq to work on communication towers who was beheaded in front of a video camera, as I am sure you know. Several things need saying — first and foremost, my prayers are with Berg’s mourning family, friends and community. Ironically, he was reportedly detained arbitrarily for days by the US after turned over by Iraqi authorities, supposedly for being out late at night. His parents blame his death indirectly on this detention, which prolonged his stay in Iraq until the Iraqi Intifada had exploded and it was no longer safe for him even to get to the Baghdad airport to leave. In the face of the arbitrary heinousness of his executioners, I have a hard time with his parents’ reasoning in blaming the US, although in a different way I do hold the administration accountable — for the exploitation of the naive strike-it-rich dreams of a young American entrepreneur which are the sorry excuse for fulfilling our ‘nation-building’ responsibility in the face of the baldfaced lies that the country has been ‘liberated’ and ‘pacified’. No one should be surprised something like this has happened; indeed, we should be surprised it is not happening more often. Be surprised that any civilians not involved in black ops or humanitarian relief, particularly someone who is Jewish as both Berg and Danny Pearl were, could be lulled into operating in the anarchic morass into which we have turned Iraq. Bush’s idiotic message of attempted consolation to the family today was that Berg died contributing to building a “free Iraq”.

It is clear that Iraq today is comprised of a small minority with an endless capacity for lethal brutality and a large majority who will passively ignore or passively celebrate the death of an American… and virtually none who support the US dreams of a democratic client state except the pitiful opportunistic exiles with no constituency to govern Iraq except the neo-cons in Washington. Now, after the US has engendered anarchic lawlessness, we will “bring the murderers to justice?” After rebuffing years’ worth of impassioned pleas from all over the world to address bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s lawlessness by lawful judicial means, we use the meaningless legalistic rhetoric only when it suits us. Berg’s slayers are about as likely to be brought to justice as Pearl’s.

Inevitably, Berg’s murder is invoked in the same breath as Abu Ghraib, in any of several senses. Some say that the revelations of the prison torture have prompted a revenge killing. It seems to me that, although his kilers said that it was provoked by Abu Ghraib, this was only a pretext. As I have said over and over, the prison tortures are emblematic of the racist, xenophobic, megalomanic attitude that informs the US invasion and occupation of Iraq as a whole. On the other hand, it does not serve to draw shrill, facile equations between the level of brutality shown by the prison guards at Abu Ghraib and that of al Zarqawi’s men in carrying out Berg’s murder. Nevertheless, let us not let the administration use the convenient timing of Berg’s murder for its own propaganda ends, to distract its American audience from the US atrocities. And let us not buy into the automatic labelling of this as ‘al Qaeda-related’, as we do every instance of franchised fundamentalist terrorism since 9-11. We now use ‘al Qaeda threat’ as generically as, for those of you old enough to remember, we used ‘Communist threat’ during the Cold War, and equally meaninglessly. Al Qaeda is our enemy; any enemy is al Qaeda. The administration claims of al Qaeda connections in Iraq were as specious as the WMD claims, and it was in particular al Zarqawi himself, as Atrios reminds us, who was used as one of the justifications for the invasion. “The Bush administration ignored 3 opportunities to get him, feeling that it would undercut their non-existent case for war in Iraq.” Since I am convinced there is little more to al Qaeda than a ragtag assortment of indigenous fundamentalist, rageful movements who admire the same icons and find it convenient for any of a number of reasons to loosely affiliate under one banner, the determination the Berg murder may provoke to exterminate the movement is likely to be futile. It is a new world and the buckaroos in the White House just haven’t got a clue; the ‘war’ is lost. [And, by the way, can you imagine how much hay the asinine Sen. Inhofe will make of this?]