I'm a General, but its not my fault...

[Solid]

Stanford study was performed by Zimbardo. Some information derived from that study which could possibly be applied here is that to deal with prisoners properly, especially those undergoing interregation, the US would need both a highly experienced 'interrogee warden' group and a supervising group.

It's an interesting study, the video footage from the observation cameras is detailed and, above all, quite scary. These people were randomly selected and 'normal', and had no clue what they were getting into. The study had to be cut short because the prisoner/guard relationship was getting so violent: both sides were planning to kill a member of the other side.


Solid

[Razor]

Originally posted by Solid
The study had to be cut short because the prisoner/guard relationship was getting so violent: both sides were planning to kill a member of the other side.

Yeah, I can fully understand that.

[Solid]

If anyone's interested, another study which is somewhat related to this incident (also very famous) was performed by Milgram. It involved civilians being tricked into thinking that they were administering increasingly lethal levels of electric shocks to a person everytime they answered the question incorrectly, all at the behest of someone in a white lab coat. The conclusion was essentially that people, regardless of race (at the time it was commonly believed that the Germans were mindless drones following orders) follow orders if given by someone in a position of percieved power.

Other than that, the most relevant psychological study would probably be into the Hawthorne effect, but I think NDD already mentioned it.

All of these studies would probably be of interest.

Solid

[P36]

June 15, 2004

U.S. missed need for prison personnel in Iraq war plans

By Dave Moniz and Peter Eisler
USA Today


The world’s most powerful military, which had crushed Saddam Hussein’s regular army in a matter of weeks, found itself in a unexpected predicament last year when U.S. forces began jailing thousands of suspected guerrilla fighters and criminals in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison.
The Army desperately needed information from prisoners about a growing insurgency that was killing more American troops than had died throughout the war itself. But commanders had far too few trained interrogators and guards to question and control the burgeoning population at Abu Ghraib.

In a scramble for personnel, commanders wound up staffing Abu Ghraib with Reserve military police who’d never had the Army’s four-week course for prison guards. And because the military intelligence unit sent to Abu Ghraib was short of interrogators, commanders patched together substitutes from other military units and from private contractors.

As investigators try to piece together what led to prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003, the shortage of trained personnel appears to be one of the keys to what went wrong.

While exactly what led to the abuse remains murky, it is clear that the Pentagon was not ready for the demand for interrogators or prison guards in Iraq. Planners apparently did not foresee the need to control large numbers of hostile Iraqis, and the Army had for years diminished its emphasis on training guards and interrogators. That meant that at Abu Ghraib and other detention sites, commanders had to rely on a patchwork of personnel, including many with little or none of the special training that military experts say is crucial to controlling prisoners.

The Army has military police trained to manage prisons. But it doesn’t have many. The Army has even tried to get out of the prison-guarding business, according to former Army Secretary Tom White, who says Army officials have explored turning over management of U.S. military prisons to private contractors.

Of an active-duty force of roughly 500,000 soldiers, only about 1,000 are certified for prison guard duty, and the vast majority of them are posted in stateside military prisons. These are MPs — “31 Echoes” in military jargon — who have spent four weeks at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., working in a mock prison and learning the basics: how to keep track of inmates, establish rapport with prisoners and quell a riot.

Col. George Millan, director of training and leader development at the U.S. Military Police School, says guarding prisoners is a specialized skill that requires careful training. Prospective prison guards are observed by non-commissioned officers who grade them on how they treat “prisoners” under their care and instruct them on the proper way to deal with violent inmates.

But the military unit that was put in charge of running prisons in Iraq, the 800th Military Police Brigade, was an Army Reserve outfit that was not trained to run prisons. The vast majority of its troops, including its commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, were part-time soldiers.

No ordinary prison

Corrections experts say that had untrained MPs been sent to the relatively benign environment of the stateside Army prisons, there probably would have been less chance for abuse. But Abu Ghraib, a chaotic mix of hard-core insurgents, criminals and Iraqis swept up in mass arrests, was no ordinary prison.

It’s still unclear why U.S. commanders in Iraq did not assign corrections-trained MPs or more experienced soldiers to Abu Ghraib. In his report of abuse at the prison, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba noted that two Army MP battalions experienced in handling prisoners of war - though not trained as prison guards - were stationed in the Middle East but were assigned to duties in Kuwait and Afghanistan.

“I’m not sure I could give a good answer,” says Pentagon chief spokesman Lawrence DiRita, who insists that the abuses were unrelated to the 800th MP Brigade being a Reserve unit. “It was a total breakdown of discipline,” DiRita says. “It could have happened to an active or a Reserve unit.”

Jim Marquart, a professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University in Texas who once worked briefly as a prison guard in an attempt to understand the job, says the problems are no surprise.

“You have people who have not been trained to be correctional officers, and that is the key to this whole thing. They lack the sense of understanding of what an inmate is,” Marquart says. “Prison is a weird and bizarre environment and it can warp and bend your mind.”

Few interrogators

Meanwhile, the interrogators in charge of questioning prisoners at Abu Ghraib were a patchwork group. The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade’s shortage of trained interrogators meant that U.S. commanders had to scramble to move interrogators in from other outfits to the 205th. They sent teams that had been questioning suspected al-Qaida fighters at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, Cuba. They sent people from disparate Reserve units in Connecticut, Texas and North Carolina. And they spent millions of dollars to hire interrogators from private contracting firms.

That’s in part because the Army’s need for interrogators has been diminishing since the Korean War. Much of the interrogation in Vietnam was done by the South Vietnamese, for example, and there were relatively few interrogations in the short 1991 war with Iraq. When the war in Iraq began in March 2003, the Army had fewer than 2,000 interrogators, many of them already deployed in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo.

“The sheer number of interrogation units is way down, personnel is way down, and the people they do have, except in Reserve units, really haven’t been concentrating on that part of the job,” says Maj. Thomas Barbeau, who heads an interrogation company in the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion.

In the late 1980s, the Pentagon reasoned that the future of intelligence gathering lay mainly in electronic collection, such as intercepts of communications. As the military entered its post-Cold War drawdown in the 1990s, interrogation units were among the first to go.

But the war on terror and the insurgency in Iraq have changed that view, as al-Qaida fighters and Iraqi insurgents have come to be seen as crucial sources of intelligence.

“The inventory (of interrogators) doesn’t meet the requirements in the field,” says Tanja Linton, spokeswoman for the Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where Army interrogators are trained.

That is changing. The Pentagon has asked the school to boost its output dramatically. It expects to graduate 539 interrogators this year, up from 237 in 2003.

Contributing: USA Today reporter Kevin McCoy

[NousDefionsDoc]

The Pentagon has asked the school to boost its output dramatically. It expects to graduate 539 interrogators this year, up from 237 in 2003.

Roger. We're on it. Typical.

[VMI_Marine]

Originally posted by P36
The world’s most powerful military, which had crushed Saddam Hussein’s regular army in a matter of weeks, found itself in a unexpected predicament last year when U.S. forces began jailing thousands of suspected guerrilla fighters and criminals in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison.

Mark Bowden wrote an excellent article for Atlantic Monthly about how the poor post-war planning enabled the insurgency to gain momentum. Here is yet another example.

[SnafuRacer]

Didn't see this here: Karpinksi demoted to Col.

In a statement released Thursday, the Army said Karpinski was guilty of dereliction of duty and shoplifting. Investigators did not substantiate allegations that she made a false statement to an investigating team and failed to obey a lawful order

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast were found not guilty of dereliction of duty, the inspector general found.

[Jack Moroney (RIP)]

Originally Posted by SnafuRacer

Didn't see this here: Karpinksi demoted to Col.

I have a problem with this. Why is this shitbird allowed to remain in the military. She has violated her position as an officer and should be thrown out on her butt. Promotions are made because the individual has demonstrated that he/she has to potential to perform at that grade. So are we now saying that this law breaker has the potential to serve at a lesser grade because all those at that grade have also demonstrated the potential to break the law. What about those that are about to be promoted to the grade to which this clown has been demoted, are we saying all LTC(P)s have demonstated that they have the potenital to perform at the same level as Karpinski. I just don't get it. You are either an officer that has won the full trust and confidence for those for whom and with whom you serve or you are not. There is no two ways about this.


Jack Moroney-have pissed off my superiors on numerous occassions but have never broken my oath or the law (at least not this country's )

[Roguish Lawyer]

Originally Posted by Jack Moroney

Jack Moroney-have pissed off my superiors on numerous occassions but have never broken my oath or the law (at least not this country's )

One of these days someone should find all of these "Moroneyisms" and copy them into a single thread. Great stuff! LMAO

[EX-Gold Falcon]

What will probable not be found when the investigation is finished is whether the actions of the prison guards were tactfully acknowledged; and thus quietly condoned.

See no evil, Hear no evil, Say no evil, gave them carte blanc.

Does anyone else notice how this situation eerily resembles certain corporate America scandals?

T.