PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) - The retiring psychology professor who ran
the famed Stanford Prison Experiment savagely criticized the Bush
administration's War on Terror Wednesday and said senior government officials
should be tried for crimes against humanity.
In his final lecture at Stanford University, Philip
Zimbardo said abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison
weren't 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.
"Good American soldiers were corrupted by the bad
barrel in which they too were imprisoned," said Zimbardo, 73. "Those barrels
were designed, crafted, maintained and mismanaged by the bad barrel makers, from
the top down in the military and civilian Bush administration."
The professor blasted President Bush, former
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials who said that
al-Qaida and Taliban captives would be considered "unlawful combatants" rather
than "prisoners of war," a designation that would invoke the Geneva
Convention.
He said those officials "should be tried for the
crimes against humanity."
Past president of the American Psychology
Association, Zimbardo is best known as the author of 1971 Stanford Prison
Experiment, in which 24 male college students assumed the roles of prison guards
and prisoners for
$15 per day.
Participants - who had no criminal records and
seemed psychologically "normal" when selected - flipped coins to determine who
would be a guard and who'd be a prisoner. By day two, guards were going far
beyond keeping prisoners behind bars: They stripped prisoners naked, cloaked
their heads with paper bags, shaved prisoners' hair and dressed them in frilly
smocks.
The two-week experiment had to be canceled after
six days because the guards became dangerously sadistic. At least five prisoners
had nervous breakdowns - crying, screaming, begging for release from the
makeshift dungeon on campus.
Decades later, Zimbardo applied his analysis to
American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. He testified as an expert witness in the court
martial of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, the highest-ranking officer
implicated in the scandal.
Frederick received a maximum eight-year prison term
for abusing and humiliating detainees. He was stripped of nine medals of honor
and 22 years of retirement pay.
Zimbardo - who spent months interviewing Frederick
and his friends and relatives, and poring over his work history and personal
background - argued that his sentence should be lessened.
Based on academic research, Zimbardo said, very few
people could resist the situational pressures of Abu Ghraib - particularly Army
reservists, themselves subject to hazing and abuse by active duty
soldiers.
"There's only one rung lower than reservists, and
that's the detainees,"
Zimbardo said while flashing dozens of "trophy
photos" of Iraqi prisoners in naked piles, being menaced by snarling German
shepherds, covered in blood, or with their eyes missing.
Zimbardo, an unusual icon of both academia and pop
culture also starred in the 2002 Discovery Channel reality show "The Human Zoo"
and the PBS series "Discovering Psychology."
On Wednesday, he displayed a grainy, 1971 photo of
Stanford's mock prisoners with bags over their heads, guards looking on casually
- then switched to an eerily similar digital photo taken in 2003 or 2004 by one
of the Abu Ghraib guards, with people in nearly identical formation and cloaks
as the Stanford snapshot.
Bush characterized the abuse as an aberration. Some
high-ranking military officials insisted that individuals - not Zimbardo's
amorphous "environment" - had to be held accountable.
The reactions still sting the professor.
"I gave the situational view, and of course the
military totally rejects it," Zimbardo said.
The anti-war activist emphasized that his analysis
wasn't a license to engage in wickedness. Zimbardo said he was providing context
to understand people like Frederick, who helped place wires on a detainee's
hands and told him he would be electrocuted if he fell while standing on a
box.
"The dialectic of human nature is good vs. evil,"
said Zimbardo, whose upcoming book, "The Lucifer Effect," summarizes his
research.
Stanford professor Benoit Monin called Zimbardo - a
child of Sicilian immigrants who grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s - "godfather"
of academic psychologists.
"He's been an inspiring role model," Monin
said as Zimbardo flashed a devilish grin and blasted the Rolling Stones'
"Sympathy for the Devil" throughout the auditorium.
