Bad apples or conditioned evil?

Check out this interview with Alex Gibney the maker of "Taxi to the Dark Side," the Oscar winning documentary on the interrogation methods used by the United States. He recounts how kids are 'trained' for a couple days and sent into interrogation rooms with little guidance but the order to extract information. Not surprisingly, the result is brutality and inhumanity.

Under controlled conditions, the transformation from a normal rights-abiding person to brutal torturing interrogator is predictable. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiments and his recent book, The Lucifer Effect, establish this. No doubt those who ran Abu Ghraib and the other detention centers knew this when they sent these kids to do the dirty work. The administration's explanation in terms of 'bad apples' is grounded in fiction, and merely a ruse used to escape liability.

For some details of detainee treatment, go here and here.

UPDATE: For an interview with Zimbardo go here. Warning: The interview includes a slide show of some very disturbing pictures from Abu Ghraib.