Curious, I really expected I would find this link in your post. But since you don't seem to have seen it here goes....

YOU CAN'T BE A SWEET CUCUMBER IN A VINEGAR BARREL [1.19.05]
A Talk with Philip Zimbardo

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'

My personal experience of the South African Apartheid Era Defence Force makes me believe Zimbardo is spot on. Furthermore the hierarchical nature of the military rapidly promotes "the most effective" personnel.

There is only ever one enemy, and that is the military. It doesn't matter which side they purport to be on.

and well made.
this discussion highlights all too well the understanding of the importance of community to and on the individual...yet some 35% of the participants in the Milgram experiment DID NOT continue to the point of sadistic inflicting of pain.

so the more interesting questions to me are:

what was the difference that made the difference in those 35% that did not continue under authority to act against their own conscinece?

and has this study been cross-culturally replicated?

and was the fact that they were in a study, given the knowledge that the mere observation of a phenomenon changes it, proposed as having an effect on the results? meaning, how generalizable is this to real life?

further,
what can these studies be used to explain, given the nature of the importance of community to the idividual,

why Darby, the whistleblower in the military has been vilified and threatened in America, and now he and his wife silenced and put in hiding by the military.

what the hell does THAT say about us as a culture?

and why there is not MORE outrage about the codifying of torture now about to happen in American law?

thanks for the discussion.

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If this were 1700, they'd be saying: "Since civilization began, slavery has existed. It's human nature." I would have believed it. If 1800: "Women will never vote. They are not born rational". I would have believed it.
2006: Make war irrelevant

New York Times, By Adam Cohen, December 28

In 1963, Stanley Milgram, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, published his infamous experiment on obedience to authority. Its conclusion was that most ordinary people were willing to administer what they believed to be painful, even dangerous, electric shocks to innocent people if a man in a white lab coat told them to.

For the first time in four decades, a researcher has repeated the Milgram experiment to find out whether, after all we have learned in the last 45 years, Americans are still as willing to inflict pain out of blind obedience.

The Milgram experiment was carried out in the shadow of the Holocaust. The trial of Adolf Eichmann had the world wondering how the Nazis were able to persuade so many ordinary Germans to participate in the murder of innocents. Professor Milgram devised a clever way of testing, in a laboratory setting, man’s (and woman’s) willingness to do evil.