"The horrifying photos of young Iraqi men abused by young American men and women have shocked the world in their vivid depiction of human degradation in much the same way as the explosive televised images of the terrorists’ destruction of the World Trade Center did on September 11th. The "unthinkable" became imaginable in both scenarios. We realized then that some people hated America enough to commit suicide in the process of killing thousands of innocent victims and demolishing cherished national symbols. But instead of asking why, to try to understand how this could have happened, our leaders asked only who. That person-centered framing motivated the search-and-destroy mission for those evil individuals responsible for spreading terror in our homeland. But we are no closer to understanding the conditions that breed terrorism so that we can work to prevent or modify them. Now we are forced to acknowledge that some of our beloved soldiers have committed barbarous acts of cruelty and sadism when they were supposed to be on a mission of maintaining law, order, and democracy, modeling the best of American values. Again, there is the same rush to the person-centered analysis of human behavior, which blames flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignores the host of contributing factors in the situation in which they were embedded. Unless we learn the dynamics of why, we will never be able to counteract the powerful systemic forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators. ... Like Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib, I was once a prison superintendent with no experience or training in corrections. My guards soon began doing terrible things that were comparable to many of the horrors reportedly inflicted on the Iraqi citizens who were being held in "pre-trial detention," for vague security reasons, without recourse to legal counsel or family. My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary for the least infractions of arbitrary rules, made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, and worse. As the boredom of the job got to some of the guards, they began using the prisoners as their playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to play. Over time, these amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I closed down the Stanford prison. Perhaps the military should follow suit in Iraq.