While military and intelligence leaders claim that individual soldiers, even if poorly-trained and managed, should have known that physical and sexual torture was wrong, it's not only clear that they're mistaken, but it's just as clear that those soldiers have other excuses for their behavior. Much of what our own government presents to our young people is LIKELY to lead to such violations.

That good ends justify forceful means, as I discussed yesterday.

High stakes. We've had a government claiming that God is on our side, that our enemies want to obliterate our way of life, and that there were weapons of mass destruction and links with the 9/11 attack. These impetuses were in the minds of the young people we sent to "save us".

The use of force, in everyday government, has changed so much in my own lifetime that I'm not surprised at the results. The threats haven't gotten worse, but our responses have. To a large extent, our policing forces have adopted, as policy, excessive responses to situations. It has produced one result we seem to take as acceptable... a small reduction of "good guy" deaths and injuries, but at the expense of "bad guy" death and injury. Our forces have upped the ante in conflict situations, in essence, claiming "mess with me and you're gonna be in a world of hurt".

Maybe it started with SWAT teams?
TV and movie glamorization of those police and military units who use overwhelming force in the name of self-protection... SWAT teams, Special Forces, SEALS, and in general, our overwheming military attack forces. We've been led into this from so many different directions... led into viewing so much of the rest of the world as enemies, as threats to us.

The many aspects of zero tolerance, 3-strikes-and-you're-out, mandatory minimum sentencing... "getting tough on crime" are all part and parcel of the attitude change that has taken place within our government. I view it as gutlessness. It is an attempt to place anyone who may be a violater... of anything we choose to view as unacceptable... as an enemy, worthy of no tolerance, and subject to our harshest response, often completely ignoring human rights and the possibility that we might be mistaken in our identification of innocents as enemies.

More than a rush to judgement, it's a rush to punishment, and it's cowardly. If one is to have good relations with others, there must be some trust involved... some patience that allows the possibility of coming to some non-violent result. Certainly, a trusting attitude involves some additional risk, but it is also the only means to a peaceful resolution. The alternative is escalating violence.

I've complained before, for example, about the spectacle of police funerals. The implications of such large, dramatic funerals is always that a public servant died bravely in combatting evil, and that such a loss of a "good guy" is always unacceptable, while the almost-invisible parade of innocent "civilian" lives lost in comflict with police is of no importance. Those "civilians" are generically "bad guys" simply because they are not one of the "good guys". We accept that "cop-killers" are worthy of capital punishment, almost regardless of the circumstances surrounding the death. It's an us-versus-them attitude, completely contrary to the view that police are public servants, called to "Serve and Protect".

We go on to over-glorify our military people, through recruiting ads on television, and through unending political pandering by leaders and candidates. Ironically, while I was online reading some of the latest revelations about American torture of Iraqis, a popup ad managed to obliterate the top of my PC screen... an ad for the National Guard. If the Guard paid for "targeted advertising", they need to do some fine-tuning.

Our government continued that glorification by controlling media coverage of the war, resulting in spectacular images of our military at their most powerful, utilizing "shock and awe". Where are the embedded reporters now? Where were they while torture and brutality were being used by "our finest"? Naturally, they were still where they were told to be... certainly not embedded in prisons.

There are so many examples of lessons that should have been, but were not learned... or were more likely just ignored by those in positions of power... of those so intent on the ends that the means became of no importance.

There were two research studies that made what happened at Abu Ghraid not an aberration, but completely predictable. An early 1970's Stanford University study put college students into a prison situation, some of them randomly chosen as prisoners and other as guards. Everyone involved knew it was a university experiment and that they could leave any time they wanted. What happened there, in a controlled situation, in ONLY SIX DAYS, was disgustingly similar to what we've seen from Abu Ghrain, a far worse situation.

There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were "good guys" who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior.

How could intelligent, mentally healthy, "ordinary" men become perpetrators of evil so quickly?

By the end of the study, the prisoners were disintegrated, both as a group and as individuals. There was no longer any group unity; just a bunch of isolated individuals hanging on, much like prisoners of war or hospitalized mental patients. The guards had won total control of the prison, and they commanded the blind obedience of each prisoner.

At this point it became clear that we had to end the study. We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation -- a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically. Even the "good" guards felt helpless to intervene, and none of the guards quit while the study was in progress. Indeed, it should be noted that no guard ever came late for his shift, called in sick, left early, or demanded extra pay for overtime work.

I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.

In the encounter sessions, all the prisoners were happy the experiment was over, but most of the guards were upset that the study was terminated prematurely. Why do you think the guards reacted this way?

After observing our simulated prison for only six days, we could understand how prisons dehumanize people, turning them into objects and instilling in them feelings of hopelessness. And as for guards, we realized how ordinary people could be readily transformed from the good Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde.

Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened."

"I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said.

At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary sex joke to humiliate them.

While excesses are not inevitable, "the literature of social psychology shows ordinary people can become cruel and abusive when given absolute power and authority over others," said Lt. Col. Thomas Kolditz, head of West Point's department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership.

"You put bright, healthy, strong young Americans into a very difficult context, and it requires extraordinary strength of character not to get somewhat twisted out of shape," said James Campbell Quick, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Texas at Arlington and a retired colonel in the Air Force Reserve. "War is a horrific kind of experience. It is in no way normal or healthy."

The results of another well-known study, done 40 years ago by Dr. Stanley Milgram, then a psychology professor at Yale, told test subjects that they were taking part in a study about teaching through punishment. The subjects were instructed by a researcher in a white lab coat to deliver electric shocks to another participant, the "student."

Every time the student gave an incorrect answer to a question, the subject was ordered to deliver a shock. The shocks started small but became progressively stronger at the researcher's insistence, with labels on the machine indicating jolts of increasing intensity - up to a whopping 450 volts.

The shock machine was a cleverly designed fake, though, and the victims were actors who moaned and wailed. But to the test subjects the experience was all too real.

Most showed anguish as they carried out the instructions. A stunning 65 percent of those taking part obeyed the commands to administer the electric shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch, marked "XXX."

An important aspect of this experiment, and of the one at Stanford, is that those in power were "in charge", and doing what they were told was needed. They had the power of force in their hands, and they abused it to a completely unexpected degree.

More importantly, all of these... the guards in Iraqi prisons, the guards in the Stanford study, and those administering the shocks in the "educational" study, were doing what seemed needed. They were the "good guys", those seeking the good results.

Concentrated power over others. Yes, we all know that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" but we still prefer to believe that it does so only to some people in some situations. We still prefer to believe that those people we elect to office are exceptions. We still prefer to believe that it's OK to force others to comply with our wishes... if our goals are worthy. IT IS NOT... and that IS the single message of "No Force"... that ANY initiated force is wrong and will have disastrous results. Every single government program that initiates force... bar none at all...  will have some terrible results. For the victims those results can be life-threatening, but the promoters and perpetrators of force suffer ill results too. The concentration of power in government, and the use of force is a very, very "slippery slope" that leads directly to the monstrous place we're at now. It will get still worse if we don't take an active role in changing it.