Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham have mounted a campaign to block the release of additional materials on may 28th mandated by a court decision supporting a suit brought by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act.
Their plea: ""We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures," the senators wrote.
http://original.antiwar.com/fisher/2009/05/11/lawmakers-try-to-block-new-abuse-photos/
Why would they feel so strongly about this?
Professor Zimbardo:
(Zimbardo was born in New York City on March 23, 1933. He completed his BA with a triple major inpsychology, sociology, and anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1954, where he graduated summa cum laude. He completed his M.S. (1955) and Ph.D (1959) in psychology from Yale University. He taught at Yale from 1959 to 1960. From 1960 to 1967, he was a professor of psychology at New York University. From 1967 to 1968, he taught at Columbia University. He joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1968.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo)
has written many books. One of the most outstanding is "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."
He is, also, the creator of the Stanford Prison Study in which 24 students assume the roles of prisoners or guards.
The following video presented by Professor Philip Zimbardo gives a hint of what they wish the american people be prevented from seeing (To those of tender sensibilities, I recommend not watching what commences at about the six minute mark):
This first part of the lecture, which has none of the shock effect of the video above, is strongly reminiscent of Hannah Arendt's book, "The Banality of Evil."
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You're killing me.
In all my dark despair
But he was there this stranger
Singing clear and strong
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song
Killing me softly with his song"
Also, if you understand the concept of salvation then one would not be afraid to risk their life to stop a tyranical government. This is why communism tries to remove God from society; so the government can continue to threaten and coerce it's citizens to do harm to other citizens. (Kind of like what we are seeing in America today.)
To see this kind of behavior from American soldiers flies in the face of everything we stood for. I did not say stand for, since today we are not the nation we once were. Sad, very, very sad.
From 1985 to 1992, when Youth Direct president Don Smarto taught criminal justice at Wheaton College [a Christian college in Illinois], he tried to introduce his students to the prison experiment by using a simulation like Zimbardo’s. To avoid abuse, he and his colleague built safeguards into the program. But they hardly expected that they would need them. “Keep in mind that the students were evangelicals from good homes, supposedly all Christians,” Smarto told CT, but “within the first hour the expletives and the foul language would start.” Then came the spitting and other vulgar actions. And in the middle of the night, when supervision was at its lightest, student “guards” stripped student “inmates” of their clothes, used handcuffs to pull their ankles into painful position behind their backs, and made them eat their cold food off the floor.
Like Zimbardo, Smarto concluded, “anyone is capable of doing anything under the right circumstances. When I saw the story come out of Iraq, I really identified with it because here were good respectable evangelical students who disintegrated pretty quickly.”
Smarto’s big surprise was that the group was not self-policing. He had thought that “if one of the guards ran amok—and we were expecting that one or two might—that the rest of the group would exhibit control, would reel them back in. Instead we found groupthink.” “I can’t explain that one,” he said. “There is no answer to it.” [“The Evil In Us,” Christianity Today, Vol. 48, No 7, page 22]
You did not say that most people who call themselves aren't Christians.
Do you not think that the Christian "guards" thought that God would judge them? Do you not think that Bush thinks God will judge him? Did his faith mean anything?
In fact, let me revise that, his faith actually made and makes him cocksure that what he's doing is right, just, moral, and directed by God himself. The fact that he has such certainty makes him more dangerous, not less. More crimes against humanity have been committed in history by those professing religious motivations than have ever been committed by atheists.
Many bad things have been done in the name of religion. Some actions are just, and some actions are nothing more than outright atrocities perpetrated by scumbags hiding behind religion.
Those prison guards were sadists, nothing more. Treat your enemy with kindness and it will be like pouring hot coals on their heads.