A parallel?

I've been following the Iraqi prisoner abuse story very closely and thinking about the possible parallel between our soldier MPs caught up in this mess and Family members caught up in FFing, child abuse, etc.

The PBS Lehrer Hour gave indepth coverage to this story by interviewing three of the top researchers (social psychologists) in the field of prisoner maltreatment, individual and group responses to stress & power imbalances. One of the main points the researchers made is that most human beings in similar positions of power and control will behave in an abusive manner under the "right" set of circumstances. Fear, stress, ignorance, irresponsible oversight, arbitrary and changing objectives all contribute to circumstances that will bring out the animal in most of us.

I am not trying to excuse what these soldiers are accused of having done. I think it's important to understand that many of our young folk serving in Iraq are relatively inexperienced, poorly trained, inadequately educated, highly idealistic, and working under conditions of enormous fear, stress, and uncertainty. Like Family, they live in a world in which their past history and hope for the future are disconnected from the present stress and fear of day-to-day survival. Talk about a compartmentalized world!

The true "aberration" in this story is the soldier who blew the whistle. He is similar to the people who resisted the Nazis by hiding Jews during WWII. Such folks have been studied, and the difference between them and the ones who went along with the fascist program is largely a matter of circumstance rather than intrinsic character.

Outside supervision, oversight and moral influence appears to have been non-existent in the US-occupied Iraqi prisons. The "system" (whatever that means in this case) may be corrupt in many regards, but the larger community of humankind can and does exert a corrective influence on the deviance of individuals who are caught up in extra-ordinary situations such as warfare. This is why the International Red Cross exists, and we would do well to quit ignoring them as though they were inconsequential do-gooders.

One would hope that the MP soldiers were paying attention to the knot in their stomachs, but the truth is, many human beings find relief from thier body tension through sadistic release. I get particularly distressed when I hear about the sadism that kids in TF were subjected to by adults. The Victor camp stories make me ill, in the same way these photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse make me ill.

Yet I do believe--knowing all too well my own heart of darkness--that there go I but for the grace of God.