[ambrose]

One of the problems I saw is that guards were laughing and full of joy. They were engaging in sadistic pleasures, not going about the business of obtaining useful information via unsavory means.

[Destro]

Oh, yea - those guards in the photos were not interrogators - probably used by the interrogators to get the atmosphere going? and when the interrogators turned their backs the guards did not stop? That is the thesis this general is putting out there. There can be some truth to what she said but who knows?

[Nick Danger]

One of the problems I saw is that guards were laughing and full of joy. They were engaging in sadistic pleasures

In 1971, a psychology experiment was run at Stanford that has since become world famous. Things got so bad that the experiment had to be shut down after only 5 days. Long story short, they took perfectly normal people, flipped coins to see which would be guards and which would be prisoners, put them in a mock "prison," and then watched what happened. The so-called "normal people" who were given the role of guards very quickly turned into extremely sadistic people who did just these kinds of humiliating things, and they seemed to be having fun doing it. There is an article about it here.

This experiment is something almost all penologists know about. Many real-world examples of this phenomenon have occurred since. This is just another one. It is a known risk that perfectly good people can turn into animals when thrown into this kind of role. Nobody really knows why, but this is a kind of weakness in human beings that anyone managing a prison has to be aware of, and needs to watch out for.