God is on America's side in the war on terrorism, President Bush has repeatedly said — and not because of who we are but because of what we believe and how we behave.

But around the world, the moral call by the commander-in-chief is being contrasted this week with photos and reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners by Americans. And tough questions are being raised about the disconnect between the moral rhetoric and the immoral result, at least in this one prison.

President Bush has made his points about American morality in a series of speeches since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life, tolerance, and freedom, and the right of conscience," he said in January's State of the Union speech.

At a news conference in March, he made the connection more explicit: "Liberty is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to each and every person," he said. "I believe that when we see totalitarianism, that we must deal with it."

And yet, day by day, reports are emerging that dozens of prisoners were beaten and humiliated by American soldiers or intelligence workers in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

American officials, including the president, have apologized even as they asserted that the abuses were limited to a few rogue soldiers.

But shouldn't the moral standard set by the president percolate down to the operations level? How could the Americans in that prison want to record their abuses with photos? What would compel even a small group of soldiers to act this way?

Where were the safeguards against acts that seemed to violate not only the moral standards set by the president, but international law as contained in the Geneva Conventions?

And how can such moral and ethical failures be prevented in the future?

None of these questions has easy answers, but some experts in military law and morality were willing to struggle with informed speculation last week. Take the questions one at a time:

How could soldiers miss the president's message about the professed moral standards of the war?

Not only has the president, a professed born-again Christian, repeatedly preached on the American vision of justice and liberty; he has emphasized that neither the Iraqi people nor Muslims nor Islam are the enemy.

But high-minded ideals seldom control what happens in a war zone, said Dr. Scott Snook, a professor of organization behavior at the Harvard Business School and a former Army colonel who helped design the leadership development program at West Point.

"People don't fight for patriotism or Mom's apple pie. They may join for that, but they don't get out of a foxhole and drag someone out of a burning Humvee for any of that," he said. "It's personal relationships."

And the same close-knit relationships that inspire heroism can carry a group of soldiers in the wrong direction, he said.

The president's high-level effort not to dehumanize Iraqis has only been partly successful, said the Rev. Steve Munson, the pastor at Grace Fellowship Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, who, as an Army chaplain in the Persian Gulf, filed weekly dispatches for The Dallas Morning News for almost a year.

"Emotionally, it's much harder to take the life of someone you recognize as completely human," he said.

And the message from the highest levels of the administration has been mixed concerning Islam, said Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, president of the Muslim business and information Web site Soundvision.com.

For instance, Lt. Gen. William Boykin, chief of intelligence for the Army, has never been reprimanded for comparing his Christian faith to Islam by saying "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol," Imam Mujahid said.

"We have created an environment in which hate of Muslims is tolerated and dehumanization of Muslims is happening in a big way," he said.

What would make the abuses caught in the photos seem like a morally justifiable idea to those involved?

There may have been a reasonable intelligence goal behind the humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners, said Dr. Earl Tilford, history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and the former director of research at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute.

"They didn't take those pictures for their own pornographic amusement," he speculated. "They intended to show the pictures to new prisoners, to tell them that this could happen if they didn't cooperate. That was a perfectly legitimate tactic."

But using the photos to intimidate new prisoners would only be legitimate if the photos themselves were fake, he said.

They could have been staged using American volunteers, or digitally created using existing pornographic photos, he said. Other experts suggest that the soldiers may not have understood what they were doing as so terrible, that they were caught up in the same vicious cycle that sometimes turns fraternity hazing into violent torture.

"It becomes like a game. It seems fun," Snook said.

What could make people act like that toward other human beings?

Two famous research studies have shown how easily people can be induced to treat others with brutality.

One involved students at Stanford University. In 1971, a group was randomly separated into "prisoners" and "guards" but given no further instruction. The experiment was shut down in six days because the "guards" had become so abusive.

An experiment conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s took unsuspecting volunteers and told them they were to shock other "volunteers" who failed to answer questions correctly. The "victims" were actually part of the experiment and were not shocked. But most of the test subjects followed orders and continued administering shocks up to lethal levels as the screams of the "victims" got louder.

It's possible that some intelligence officers contributed to make a bad situation worse, said Tilford, a former Air Force intelligence officer.

"From my experience, we felt sometimes that the rules didn't apply to us," he said. "We felt that we had more information and more insight. One of the problems with that is you develop a sense of relative morality."

Where were the safeguards?

Army investigators found that even the most basic backstops weren't in place. Relevant portions of the Geneva Convention are supposed to be posted at any prison in English and in the language of the prisoners. That didn't happen at Abu Ghraib, according to the Army report. The report also said commanders failed to properly monitor what was going on.

But there may have been other less procedural reasons for a moral breakdown.

The chaplain corps is supposed to be one bulwark against immoral commands and commanders, said the Rev. Munson, a former Marine sergeant.

Chaplains, he said, "are the ethical or moral conscience of the battalion. How effective we are varies."

Chaplains are trained to seek potentially unethical or immoral behavior, and soldiers are told to seek the chaplain if they have ethical questions about orders, he said.

The Rev. Munson was assigned to a different military police unit than the one implicated in the Abu Ghraib abuse. But he visited two prisons during his duty in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, and had no sense that anything was wrong, he said.

View Comments

What are the moral lessons of Abu Ghraib?

The Rev. Munson said that he and some of his fellow chaplains are already discussing what they might do differently in the future.

At West Point, instructors are also trying to figure out how to use Abu Ghraib the same way they've been using the Vietnam War's My Lai massacre — as an example for the next generation of officers of how not to act during war.

"This," said Col. Patrick Finnegan, head of the law department at West Point, "undercuts everything we say we're about."

Join the Conversation
We’re testing some changes to our moderation system. You’ll see two changes:
  1. Fewer comments automatically sent to moderation (we hope).
  2. Lower tolerance for uncivil comments. If you encounter a warning that your comment will be sent to moderation, try revising before you submit for the best chance of approval.
Your feedback is welcome and can be submitted here.
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.