To prosecute or not to prosecute: II

The well known Stanford prison experiment, pointed out some very dark aspects of the human mind. In this experiment, conducted in 1971 and worth recounting here, a group of undergraduate students were chosen to play prison guards and prisoners in a mock prison in a Stanford basement. The chosen students were psychologically stable and healthy normal people with no crime histories and their roles as prisoners or guards were assigned randomly. The experiment was supposed to run for fourteen days. The prisoners were "arrested" and finger-printed and photographed and transported to the "prison". They were given prisoner clothing and a number sewn on their clothes to identify them. The prison guards were given "uniforms" and batons. Within a very short time the situation grew out of hand. At first riots broke out, which were suppressed by the guards who turned very sadistic and the prisoners suffered humiliating treatment at their hands. The prison guards harassed the prisoners and the punishments went as far as forced nudity and sexual humiliation. Around fifty outsiders who were introduced to this experiment said nothing until the girlfriend of the professor running the experiment finally objected to the prison's apalling condition and the experiment's morality. All this happened with six days and the experiment had to be terminated early. The prison guards were upset about the premature termination and the prisoners suffered emotional trauma.

Ten years before the Stanford prison experiment was conducted another professor, at Yale, had conducted another experiment: the Milgram experiment. In this experiment, a group of random people were chosen to play the role of a "teacher". There was also a "learner" who was part of the experimenting team and an "experimenter", a pretty unemotional biology researcher who was experimenting memory and learning in different situations. In the beginning the teacher read out a set of word pairs for the learner. After that, the teacher would read out the first word and the learner had to choose the second word of the pair from a group of four words. Every time the learner made a mistake the teacher was supposed to impart punishment by electric shock. And the voltages of the shocks went up steadily by 15V to a maximum of 450V. The learner and the teacher were in different rooms and they could hear but not see each other. The learner was not receiving actual shocks but the electrical switches were set up to play pre-recorded screams of pain when the "shock" was administered. The learner would also bang on the wall and sometimes fall completely silent. If a "teacher" objected to the experiment at any point, the biology researcher in the grey/white coat would insist that the experiment be continued and that the teacher would not be held personally responsible for any injury to the learner. Everytime the teacher protested the researcher would insist more forcefully: there were four such insistence levels and if the teacher still protested after the fourth and very firm insistence the experiment was halted. Otherwise the experiment halted after administering the maximum voltage of 450V. After the results were tallied it turned out only one person refused to carry on beyond a 300V level and 65% of participants went up to the 450V level, although many questioned the experiment but were persuaded by the authority of the grey coat researcher.

These two experiments point out two things. One, even normal people can become sadistic and torturous under certain situations. It does not matter what their personalities or characters are like, the system overpowers them and they do as the system demands. Two, most people defer to authority even when they feel that what they are being asked to do may not the most ethical task. People are quite obedient to authority. The usual sentence that  is used to describe this is "they were just following orders." This was seen in Nazi Germany when the Germans were "just following orders" when they sent millions of Jews to their deaths. Just following orders? Whatever  happened to conscience?

However, there is a more immediate application of the argument in these two experiments: Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Were the soldiers just following orders in Abu Ghraib? Whose orders were they? And why were the people in command not aware of the dark side of the human mind? Why did they not institute a system where torture is not permitted? Were the CIA interrogators just following orders? Again whose orders? And regardless of who was giving orders and who was receiving them, what happened to their conscience?

The world punished the Nazis for their dark deeds regardless of whether they were giving orders or they were just carrying them out. Why then is America afraid to deal with its own set of dark commanders and subordinates?