A Little Context

With the Iraqi prison abuse scandal raging, it is useful to take a moment from hand-wringing and how-could-they-do-this-whining to remember The Stanford Prison Experiment

The brainchild of Stanford University Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo, the SPE was designed to study how psychologically "normal" people would react to role playing as prisoners and guards while being immersed in a simulated prison environment for two weeks.

[...]

The guards that wanted to put in their time on a shift and go home did nothing to stop the guards that reveled in exercising their power over the prisoners. One guard was nicknamed "John Wayne" by the prisoners because he was so sadistic. Yet he was the "nicest" guard on the street, and he only made his transformation from the gentle Dr. Jekyll to the monstrous Mr. Hyde when he put on his guard's uniform.

The guards were given wide latitude in how to treat the prisoners with the caveat they could never strike them. As the days went by the guards as a whole flexed their power by increasing their aggressive, humiliating and dehumanizing tactics against the prisoners.

[...]

An outside observer who saw the SCP for the first time after it had been operating for nearly six days was horrified to see that it had become indistinguishable from a real prison environment. She was able to convince Professor Zimbardo after a prolonged and impassioned argument that as administrators of the "prison" he and his assistants had become blind to the unconscionable activities happening in front of their eyes. The SPE was a "controlled" experiment that had spun out of the control of the educators monitoring it. So after six days the SCP was abruptly shut down and the two-week experiment was terminated.

This happened in under six days, with direct supervision, at a pastoral college campus, to unthreatened college students.

Now take those same students, fly them halfway around the world, put them in a dangerous place, with dangerous inmates who don't even speak their language. I would submit that we should be encouraged that this scandal isn't much worse than it is.