How come bright ideas like the Zimbardo prison experiment are so little discussed? Google "zimbardo prison" to get the background. Then Google "zimbardo ghraib" to see items on this Iraq prisoner abuse. All blogs. Seymour Hersh got it right on the News Hour when he said its not "just a few bad seeds" like the chiefs are spinnig it. This abuse is reflective of an environment that said hey, no rules for dirty Iraqis.. when the truth comes out maybe we'll get the bit by bit story of how it got to the point that probably normal kids ended up posing and laughing over stacks of bodies. In those moments I'm sure they couldn't distinguish between those prisoners and annoying mosquitoes on a summer day. Heads should roll on this one, but what disturbs me much more deeply is the utter ignorance of the socio-psychological work, now thirty years old, that predicts what happened at Abu Ghraib. It is scary to think of this so very tech-smart country --- USA --- being so very people-stupid. The Founding Fathers would be ashamed, and their genius truly squandered. They looked at the dark side and designed a constitution against it. Contrary to Bush's stupid claim about "its not in our nature as Americans", it *is* in the nature of all human beings, including every American, to be cruel when authority and environment encourage it. And it happens all too often in racist America, and would happen more if not for the design of the constitution. Power makes you very very stupid.