The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal shocked the whole nation into disbelief that our United State's army can do such a thing. In Marianne Szegedy-Maszak's, The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism, explains the rough conditions and new situations these young soldiers were faced. The Abu Graib prison shared many traits needed to make our everyday human beings in to a torturer. But, what would it take for me and you to act out such a horrific ordeal?

Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram created an experiment that attempts to prove that evil can exist in what we would consider "normal" people. Milgram, wanted to see the extreme measures one would go to when a higher power of authority delivered an order. Milgram simulated an electric chair which an actor was told to pretend to act out in pain when a student was told to deliver current in to the chair. The experiment was for the student to shock the actor in the chair every time the actor gave out an incorrect answer. The outcome of two out of three students had obeyed the orders of Milgram to deliver shocks that would have enough volts to kill a grown man.

The Stanley Milgram experiment showed that 2/3 is a promising torture. Robert Okin of the University of California- San Francisco had once said the torture was "an inexcusable was of working off their rage, anxiety about their own safety, and their sense of helplessness." The harsh living conditions and constant danger aggravate the soldiers to become more helplessness and filled with anxiety. With the appreciated fact of sex often relieving the stress and unwinding the soldier from the hard ship of war, is what was missing from Iraq.

The Three traits that was necessary for torture was found in the Abu Ghraib prison; authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. Authorization, helps the soldier feel that what there are doing is right when someone with a higher power tells them what they are doing is acceptable, for example if society tell us that it's wrong to stack Iraqi prisoners like wood but the prison commander tells them that they are doing a great job. Routinization, the division of labor, helps the solider feel that they are not committing the act of torture, but just doing what their told. Dehumanization, meaning calling your enemy names to separate them from any thought of being a human, for example U.S troops calling the Japanese "Japs", the Vietnamese "nips"