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Yes and no.

The military, like many complex, multi-tasked, multi-goaled, multi-motivated organizations and individuals

can be chronically awful

at dishing out very conflicting messages.

Such as . . . Don't get drunk. If you don't get drunk, you're not a man.

And, as Zimbardo's classic prisoner/guard experiment has shown, about 30% of the average population will become extremely authoritarian, gestapo like with merely the instruction to fill the role of a guard over others assigned by lot to fill the role of a prisoner.

Zimbardo noted that if the monsters are 'out there,' it's not so bad. We can gang up on them. But, if [as the Scriptures indicate--with the pollution of 'original sin'], if the monster is within all of us, it's a lot scarier.

From my very distant perspective, my hunch is that officers involved were grappling with how to intimidate and coerce the Iraqi's into compliant helpfulness without wholesale physical abuse and wholesale violation of Geneva conventions etc.

And, as other research has shown, the capacity to rationalize is quite extensive--especially in the face of incremental sliding down moral slippery slopes. The first slight deviation is inconsequential. The next step similarly small and in itself inconsequential. After a dozen such inconsequential steps, horror can be afoot quite readily.

Actually, given all the givens in our culture in our era, I'm rather surprised it wasn't worse sooner.