[richlevy]

Stanley Milgrams experiment in Obedience

If you want to understand some human behavior, you can look at Stanly Milgram's Experiment in Obedience

In the 1960's, Milgram told subjects that they would be 'teaching' volunteers by administering electical jolts when the volunteers made a mistake.

When the "teacher" asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the "teachers" obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!

Milgram's experiment was controversial in it's effect on the subjects. Even after being told that there was no real physical damage to the 'volunteer', many of the test subjects suffered attacks of conscience.

In effect, Milgram was conducting a 'morality test' of average Americans (the test was later peformed in other countries). He advanced the theory that while some Nazi leaders were sociopaths, the capacity to commit acts of atrocity exists in 'normal' citizens, requiring only the encouragement of authority.

Project Phoenix in Vietnam

This is the best summary I could find of
The Phoenix Program: in Vietnam. I placed a quote below I should add that the last statement has never been completely proved. The part that ties in with our current discussion about military prisons is the rules for detention of individuals who were 'suspected' of Viet Cong (VC) sympathies or activities.

Picture an Enron environment in which artificial quotas replace any qualitative measure of success. Now picture middle managers under pressure to meet quotas. Except instead of a board room or assembly line, the quotas cover the interrogation, torture, and executions of individuals.

"Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."

"Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed a quota of eighteen hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government: 'If you don't do what I want, you're VC.'"

"Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon" of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror - the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.