History: Stanford Prison Experiment and New York Times Essay

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Dear editor of New York Times: In the article of Tortured Logic, I believe what happened at the Abu Gharaib Prison Scandal was very inhumane and the suspects who had their hand in this should be held accountable. The way the dogs were used was so degrading and low-down; that it was in one word: hateful. As stated” In late 2003 and early 2004, both men used their dogs to intimidate Iraqi prisoners during interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison.” No matter how big of an enemy another nation may be to another, these actions are unacceptable and unjust. No one should ever have to be so humiliated that they embarrass themselves. Anthony Lagouranis writes, “Sometimes they were so terrified they'd wet their jumpsuits.” There is no credible explanation anyone can give to express this claim. No one can say they deserved it since 90% of them were innocent and no one can utter they thought they were doing the right thing since out of their own humanity they knew what they were doing was outrageous and had no good reasons to provoke such cruelty. Even if they were crazy (which I doubt) they knew out of common sense that these prisoners didn’t deserve such drastic discipline. As a result, I find this whole article disturbing and I believe anyone who played any part of this scandal should be put in prison and suffer the same punishments as they exercised on these innocent Iroquois prisoners. In addition, given all the knowledge that I accumulated through this article, I do agree with Philip Zimbardo; Power does turn good soldiers/ people into bad apples. As stated, “Some of the necessary ingredients are: diffusion of responsibility, anonymity, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do not intervene, and a setting of power differentials.” In Tortured Logic these ingredients that made people turn into bad apples was apparent. As written, “When the chief warrant officer at our interrogation site in Mosul first told me to use dogs during interrogations, it seemed well within what was allowed by our written rules and consistent with what was being done at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers.” As a result, this practice was a great example of bystanders who don’t intervene. Because these officers could make their own rules without the assistance of someone else made it easy for them to abuse their rights and take advantage of the Iroquois prisoners. In addition, in this article a lot of dehumanization took place. Anthony writes, “The prisoners didn't know that, though, because they were blindfolded; if they gave me an answer I didn't like, I could cue the handler so the dog would bark and lunge toward them.” Truly this is a cruel way to treat someone who is innocent and it’s not fair how these people had authority to do this just because it was a nation that posed as a threat. As a result, bad apples do turn good soldiers into them. Given the right stations, a person will abuse power and do whatever they want. With this authority it becomes clear that “good” soldiers can go out of their way to enforce extreme tactics on innocent people since they had no boundaries of punishing these innocent prisoners. With this realization it becomes clear to me that I believe that Mr. Zimbardo is correct and totally credible with his claim.
In addition to the Abu Gharib Prison Scandal, there was also the Milgram Experiment and Stanford Prison Experiment that too showed undeserved torture. In the Milgram Experiment, there were people recruited from around the world and all those who participated acted as a teacher; although convinced that half of them would be
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