abu ghraib prison experiment

Are the American soldiers who abused Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "a few who have betrayed our values," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims? Or are they victims of a prison system guaranteed to produce atrocities?
In recent days, the latter view has taken hold, buttressed by the Stanford Prison Experiment, a 1971 study in which upstanding young men assigned to be "guards" in a mock jail abused their "prisoners." The study's designer, former Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo, has become the media's favorite expert on prison abuse, imprinting his blame-the-situation attitude on newspaper, magazine, and television coverage of the Iraqi prison scandal. The emerging spin is that the Stanford Prison Experiment explains scientifically what happened in Iraq at the Abu Ghraib prison.
But science, particularly social science, isn't all scientific. Every experimenter begins by drawing a box. Inside the box are the factors he decides to control or measure. The rest, including him, are left out, either because he can't control or measure them, or because he doesn't think they're important. The box-drawing process is seldom scientific and often cultural or political. Consequently, excluded factors often turn out to be more important than included ones.
From the silence of the 30 year old Stanford Prison Experiment, a voice of consciousness awakens to expose the realities of our surroundings in the form of the Abu Ghraib Prison Experiment.
This profile was created by our comrades in arms over at Visual Sound.