Tuesday, March 20, 2007

"The retiring psychology professor who ran the famed Stanford Prison Experiment savagely criticized the Bush administration's war on terrorism and said senior government officials should be tried for crimes against humanity. In his final lecture at Stanford University on Wednesday, Philip Zimbardo said abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were not isolated incidents by rogue soldiers. Rather, sadism was the inevitable result of U.S. government policies that condone brutality toward enemies, he said. Individual military personnel -- those who stripped prisoners and leashed them like dogs -- are only as culpable as the people who created the overall environment in which the soldiers operated, Zimbardo told undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology." (thanks May)