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A much higher percentage of people will engage in maltreatment and maybe even commit atrocities under certain circumstances than most of us believe. Many studies after WWII by Stanley Milgram and others have concluded this, and their experiments have been replicated over three decades and always come to essentially the same conclusions. Now that's just good scientific data, and useless if nobody converts it into plain talk which organizations can use. The plain talk is that ambivalence about personal responsibility, peer pressure, and inadequate guidance and supervision from superiors is likely to lead to incidents such as is currently being decried about a third of the time. Almost anyone who has been to a War College and many who have done graduate work in management would have studied Milgram, and practically anyone who has taken even Psychology or Sociology 101 would be somewhat familiar with Milgram's work--the Obedience to Authority Experiments; the Stanford Prison Experiment, etc.

The perpetrators can not be excused for what they have done, and will be prosecuted, to be sure, and if found guilty, punished. On the other hand, either officers and policy makers were ignorant or inept or both not to have put better procedures and policies into place. Anyone who has ever run anything-- military or civilian--knows the word supervision, and the basic fact that if you don't supervise, policies, procedures, etc. mean little, and accomplish less. Training helps, too, but hanging a bunch of snuffies without the officers-in-charge being punished even more severely for inadequate supervision would be a travesty of justice, IMHO.

If anyone's interested in Stanley Milgram's research, just go to Google or any other major search engine and enter his name. His research has held up amazingly, especially since it implies that many who criticize maltreatment very likely might do the same thing under similar circumstances.

On the other hand, there are plenty who wouldn't, and the whistle-blower apparently came from the same unit as the perpetrators.

Conclusion: when there is a situation where some people are given great power over others, some will abuse their power if not closely supervised. Be wise, supervise.

Conclusion: when there is a situation where some people are given great power over others, some will abuse their power if not closely supervised. Be wise, supervise.

Probably true --- this is the "jackass" generation and what goes for humor with a certain number is going to be disgusting. Plus the democrats gave us them Bill Clinton for a role model ---- and defended him sodomizing the young interns and rape of women in hotel room and kids grew up seeing that kind of abuse of power was accepted.