Trained killers sometimes do bad things

NY Times article

No, this is not an attack on soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, just more evidence of how gearing individuals and societies toward war naturally generates a streak of sadism. Discuss.

I think it would be more correct to say that the small portion of the population with tendencies to be bullies gravitate towards professions and hobbies that allow them to indulge those tendencies.

The chain of command, the State Department, the Justice Department and others are at fault for attempting to legitimize torture as a intellegence tool, which essentially gives the bullies free reign. But I don't think they're creating bullies out of normal, well-adjusted young men and women. The bullies are always there... they just wait for the rest of us to turn our backs on their victimization.

War doesn't create monsters. War makes use of monsters that already exist.

I disagree.

It has been thus since man first picked up a stick and bonked his neighbor on the head with it...only now we have an ever more pervasive, and in some cases biased (on both sides) mass media element reporting sometimes simply to inform, other times for political/ideological reasons. I'd hazzard a guess that if WWII were covered with the tenacity that events are covered today, our perception of the Allies would be a whole lot different...

Good point.
Especially the part about waiting for the rest of us to turn our backs on their bad behavior.
While it's true normal people can be manipulated by athority figures to hurt people , I think much of the truly sadistic is the work of natural bullies given free reign.

Ghod I can't wait for the draft to come back

I am not a sadist, neither is my brother, my father, my cousins, my uncles, or my grandfather, and we were all "trained to kill" by either the US Army or the USMC.

I can compile for you a long list of murderers, sadists and many other types of scumbags that never served in our armed forces, if you see the need to do so.

As a matter of fact, I believe our military does a fairly good job of preventing psychos from entering the service.

History proves that war was genetically implanted on humans, take your case to the woman upstairs.

Interesting point, I wonder what the proportion of sadists in the military is compared to violent criminals in the general population?

And the violent criminals who come from the typical demographic soldiers come from?

Of course leadership in the military needs to be stricter as a result of the things that have happened.

And the policy should be POW until decided as a potential terrorist by some sort of authority.

Not the other way around.

I think there should be no military anywhere in modern society, or police for that matter. That would make my plans for world domination sooooooo much easier. Or in the short term, it sure would make my banking easier.

Ok seriously, how come there are 500 posts regarding the reported bad behevior of the U.S. military, yet no one has any concern about say...the torture that Castro inflicts on prisoners in Cuba? The allegations of rape and mistreatment by U.N. peacekeepers? The abuse claims leveled against the French military in the Ivory Coast situation? The atrocities from all sides involved in the Sudanese civil war? I'm sure that if Liberals or Conservatives could only score some political clout from these issues we'd be hearing about them a whole lot more....

Modern intelligence collection is about interrogation, databases, and cross-correlation of data, not torture. That incidents like this occur is a matter of command and training failure, not policy. It's long been known that physical torture is a poor way to collect intelligence, and were it policy, I doubt our leaky security could possibly keep it secret. We can't even keep the mundane secrets secret. There are simply too many people involved and the story is too sensational to pass up.

Monsters make terrible warriors. What's necessary are well trained and experienced men and women with the confidence to make good decisions based on limited information. These good decisions, however, don't make news. The number of captures, bribes, payoffs, and trades of favor used by the military and the intelligence operators in achieving ends peacably far exceed the number of bombs dropped.. but these don't make good news. We only see/hear the same clips and statements played repeatedly along with variations on the same speculation and hyperbole generated by media flunkies seeking sensational stories.

It's important to approach each incident objectively rather than jumping to knee-jerk conclusions. Places like http://www.strategypage.com/ can be used to provide a different perspective. Modern civilization requires an informed, inquiring populace.

Don't drink only the pap supplied by media conglomerates who measure success not in facts conveyed, but by eyeball time.

--v

Nice questions to ask, but they're impossible to measure, and worse, impossible to judge the results of.

Define "sadist"? How are you going to measure the "potential" of someone becoming a "sadist"? Can one state with any confidence at a set of measures is discriminating between "sadists" and "non-sadists"? We can barely define what attention deficit disorder is in schoolchildren; how can we say anything about something that might occur somewhen in someone's life?

It's no more useful than asking "What's the probability your next door neighbor is an axe-murderer?" If you knew the answer, would it influence your decision to move elsewhere? How does it compare with the probability of being hit by a truck tomorrow?

--v

Could quanitfy with just Court Marshals though I suppose, tho im sure a lot goes on thats not prosecuted. Kind of like violent crime in civilian life.

What im gettign at is -

How much is product of society and how much product of the military?

I think it's very naive to discount the average human's proclivity toward cruelty given the right circumstances or impetus. Before you pat yourself on the back for not being one of those horrible evildoers, maybe you should read this:

http://www.prisonexp.org/

Note that even the researchers themselves are not immune to the influence of circumstance on their behavior.

Castro, the UN, the French, and the Sudanese do not wear American military uniforms while serving within an American chain of command which, ultimately, is under control of the American people. How our military acquits itself is a reflection upon the citizenry of this country.
The 500 posts regarding reported bad behavior are posts about behavior done in our name.

The Milgram Study of Obedience proved that humans, even non-violent or mentally unstable ones, will be fully capable of sadistic actions on their own -- when given command to do so from a superior.

The issue is authority -- a perfectly good soldier will do what they are told by their commander and walk away guilt free from a horrible atrocity. They might not even know they did something horrible. And in war -- it happens all the time. There were hundreds if not thousands of documented crimes against humanity committed by US troops as well as against Saddam and also the rebels/insurgents.

None of them will think they have ever done wrong and many people will side with them who've never even fought in a war.

It's a fact of life.

The thing is -- we don't have to be that way. It's just easier to. It's never easy to accept a pacifist path. It's never easy to turn your cheek if someone hits you. It's never easy to disobey and drop your gun.

Though I'm not saying there isn't a need to defend yourself;

I mean to say that free will would go a long way to lower crimes of war.

full obedience is not necessary for an army I don't think. I think if you had a good leader and a reason to lead an army, there will be people who'll follow you.

The link in my first response went to an overview of the Milgram study.
To simplify things for the those who didn't click it, it found most people could be manipulated to hurt others under the influence of authority. In that study, volunters believed they were giving painful, perhaps life-threatening shocks to a subject (actually an actor pretending to get shocked.) for some important expiriment. People who hesitated were urged by the authority figure (some professor type standing nearby in a uniform) that it was ok, if not very important, that the volunteers kept zapping the poor guy.

That being said, there's still a difference in a normal person manipulated into hurting someeone and some sadistic brute who hurts someone for fun.
A true sadist would enjoy the power trip he got as he shocked the guy, and would not need any urging from the authority person to keep going.
While a normal person may be easily duped into doing the same thing because he trusts the authority who's insisting it's ok, if not vital to do so, I don't think s/he is enjoying the process, or will remember it fondly.

The problems with the detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan are related directly to problems with our own prison system. Many of the abuses are commited by National Guard members who in their first jobs are prison guards in US prisons. Most prisons here are now privately run with llittle or no oversight by the state or federal governments. Prisons are typically understaffed and the gurds are used to brutal treatment of the prisoners, in an attempt to control them. I wish the press would spend a little more time discussing the many horrifying abuses committed against prisoners here in the US.

Undoubtedly true, as is your observation about war in other nations. In war, no one keeps their hands clean; everyone commits atrocities, beginning with war itself. What the media exposed so shockingly in Vietnam, and what they're beginning to report in the Middle East, is not just isolated acts of barbarism, but the very nature of war. We seek band-aid solutions, try to find someone to pin it on, some "monster," but what are the odds that that prison in Afghanistan just happened to be full of "monsters?"

Perhaps calling it sadism is going too far. I don't mean to imply that all war criminals get off on what they do. Some succumb to command pressures, as in the Milgram studies, and for others it's a kind of group-think, as with the MPs tearing up the legs of inmates in Afghanistan as a disciplinary measure; everyone was doing it, could it be so bad?

War is a bad idea. Last time I marched on the White House, my sign read, "Fucking war? Studpid asshole!" It pretty well sums up my feelings. Even if you, as a country, end up with more resources, more territory, or a wider market for your goods, you still lose because of what you become.

America is becoming a warring state. War drives our economy. Most of the the corporations that guide policy today trace their roots back to the Civil War, when corporations were declared "natural persons" under US law, just in time for the Industrial Revolution. Ever since, we have labored tirelessly to accumulate and liquidate resources in the interest of these corporations, and when locally available resources thin out, that means war.

This state of affairs is in direct contradiction to the original aims of our Revolution. We fought off tyranny that we could be "let alone," yet now we impose ourselves upon the population of the earth, demanding that they support us in largesse.

Turn around. Take a look at where you are. It's pretty scary.

Well said!

-Kiamat Dusk

Humans are frail creatures. Anyone exposed to the horrors of war is very succeptable to a darker side of them emerging and commiting horrors. If you lived in fear every day, bombs blowing up around you, your buddies getting shot, halfway around the world from home, where you're not sure if the people around you are insurgents or just plain citizens, you'd be having problems, too.

Here's a good article by the BBC about soldiers returning home with a high rate of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4474715.stm

Here's an excellent book recounting first-hand what it was like to be in Vietnam:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/157071987X/qid=1116659956/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-3968928-1232161?v=glance&s=books

It's not to say that the soldiers shouldn't take responsibility for their actions, but I think the real crime is by the officers who let it happen.

Interesting concept you got there, Vudu.

Let's take a quick look at Vudu through the ages.

Civil War
"Fucking war? Studpid asshole!"
-If Vudu had his way, we'd have half the country and slavery.

WWII
"Fucking war? Studpid asshole!"
-Well, at least we wouldn't have anymore pesky Jews, huh, Vudu?

Kosovo
"Fucking war..." Oh wait, there was a Democrat in office. YAY WAR!!!

Afghanistan
"Fucking war? Studpid asshole!"
-We had 9/11 coming! It's our own fault!!

Liberals will never get it through their heads that some things are worth fighting for. Lacking morals or ethics of any kind, they can easily justify any atrocity from the massacres in South Vietnam and Cambodia by the North Vietnamese after we pulled out, to Saddam's mass graves. They do not believe that somethings are simply evil and must be stopped. Period.

War is an awful thing, but sometimes it *is* the only way.

-Kiamat Dusk
Make love AFTER war!

Kiamat, there are very few stereotypes about liberals I agree with, but this is one of them.

Of course, the case for Iraq, again, was WMD, and not mass graves / deposing a dictator.

I think it just goes to show that liberals need conservatives to reinforce the reasons to go to arms, and conservatives need liberals to make sure that wars are fought for the right reasons and done in the least-evil way possible. You should read Sun Tzu's "Art of War".

On the other hand, here's a list of people liberated without violence:
- India / Pakistan by Ghandi's movement
- USSR and the Eastern European Communist Bloc through diplomacy of Pope John Paul II, Reagan, Thatcher, and others
- Ukraine, recently, through Viktor Yushenko's orange movement
- Blacks in the United States gaining full civil rights through Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement
- South African blacks, through Nelson Mandela's crusade

Clearly, freedom can be obtained without war. It is possible.

Back on the first hand, though, one could arge that it might not always be possible. I think the main thing is that absolutely should violence be avoided until it is unavoidable.

In the case of Iraq, the US was promoting violence for the last several decades with arms sales, (brokered by Donald Rumsfeld), training guerillas, (Muslim extremists were trained by the US to fight the USSR in Afghanistan back in the early 80s), and even supposedly aiding Iraq's chemical weapons' program against Iran. Those mass graves of Kurds? Guess whose technology enabled it? ... Iraq is not a case where we avoided violence at all costs. It's a case where we have been screwing up for years, and are finally cleaning up our mess, at the cost of more lives.

This is both false and a generalization. Anecdotally, I know many liberals and leftists who passionately fight for what they believe in. However, to avoid the mistake of generalization, I must admit that statistically speaking there must be a few who will not realize that some things are worth fighting for.

This is both false and a generalization. Anecdotally, I know many liberals and leftists who do not just have morals and ethics but could write a book on the difference between morals and ethics. Additionally, it is false and a generalization to say that a given group of people all justify atrocities and that they all do not believe that somethings are evil. Finally, the absolute marker "Period" is evidence of another falsehood and generalization -- no group of people can be defined simultaneously generally and absolutely.

~Ulrika~

Prove it. And when I say fight, I mean picking up a weapon and going to war-not marching down Mainstreet USA under the protection of the police and the Constitution.

Would it make it easier if I just said "the vast majority of Liberals"?

Moreover, it's been my experience from these forums and from my observations dealing with Liberals on the street-Maryland is crawling with them-that Liberals do indeed lack anything resembling a spine. They are like water, they can fit any situation. Any act is justifiable to them. The only country that does not receive the benefit of their doubt is the US. The only religion of which they are not tolerant is Christianity.

-Kiamat Dusk