Resident Bush seems to now be blaming the troops for the activities at Abu Ghraib, although I believe that the government's position has been that the activities at Abu Ghraib were always the actions of a few "bad apples."
Of course the question is "What were the orders given to the soldiers at Abu Ghraib (and other detention facilities) regarding the treatment of prisoners, and who authorized the torture techniques used?"
If in fact the orders went as high as the White House the soldiers would have been just following orders. As a rule, a soldier is not supposed to follow an "illegal order." But how does this work in the field. How often would a soldier subordinate a superior officer and be subject to court-martial, even if they believed that what they were doing was wrong?
This issue is reminiscent of a series of experiments which began in July 1961 and were conducted by Stanley Milgram. They became known as the Milgram experiment.
(note: I realize that there have been several comments on the link between Bush's authorizations and the Milgram experiment, but could not find any evidence of any diaries being posted.)
The purpose of these experiments was to test the willingness of volunteers to inflict pain on a willing participant as ordered by the teacher, or authority figure. The twist was that the "subject" of the experiment believed that they were merely a participant and that the actual willing participants were the "subjects."
Wikipedia entry
I won't go into the details of the experiment, which are covered in the Wikipedia article, as well as several other good sources.
link 1
link 2
The results of the experiment showed that 65% of the subjects were willing to administer shocks to the supposed subject, by orders of the professor, of such intensity the the supposed subject expressed severe physical pain, even begging for the subject to stop. (The supposed subjects obviously received no shocks and were merely acting.)
This is what Milgram concluded:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
source:Milgram, Stanley. (1974), "The Perils of Obedience". Harper's Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority.
If a so-called "normal person" participating in a voluntary experiment was unwilling to disobey an authority figure in administering severe pain to a subject (the actual subjects later admitted that they had extreme discomfort and reservations about administering the high-voltage shocks, but were unwilling to question the authority figure) then how can we expect our soldiers to risk court-martial, or worse, in subordinating a commanding officer?
Hopefully those that issued the orders to torture, which it seems now reach as high as Bush will pay the price for violating not only United States law but International law.