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The infamous Stanford Experiment of 1971 should have taught us: People put in control of others will inevitably abuse their subjects, unless prevented from doing so by higher authorities.
In that experiment, ordinary people volunteered to play either guards or prisoners, and were assigned to either role by chance. The abuse got so bad, particularly on the night shifts when there was little supervision, that the experiment had to be called off.
I had a personal experience with this syndrome long before 1971. After basic training at Fort Dix in 1953 I was assigned to the MP detachment there as a prison guard. There had been a major scandal involving prisoner abuse, and a new provost marshall arrived about the same time I did, with orders to clean up the situation. He did, virtually overnight; the abuse stopped once the guards realized it would not be tolerated. I witnessed no abuse during the year I was there, but I did hear some real horror stories from those who were there before me.
The prisoners were not dangerous criminals or unlawful combatants; for the most part they were young draftees in basic training having difficulty adjusting to military life. The guards were not naturally mean people either, and could easily have been on the other side. But when given the opportunity their baser instincts took over. I would probably have joined in had I been assigned there earlier, as would most of the prisoners if the situation had been reversed.
The situation had festered for years, despite it being common knowledge within the training batallions. I suspect the leadership there tacitly encouraged the mistreatment, to sapread fear in the other trainees through word of mouth. That is also why dictators like Saddam Hussein tolerate and encourage such abuse.
As with Abu Ghraib, the Fort Dix abuse didn't stop until it finally became public, most likely after the son of a prominent individual got abused.
The point is that prisoner or detainee abuse, in military or civilian prisons, will not happen unless the supervising authorities take positive action to prevent it; it is dereliction of duty at best if they don't. And those supervizing authorities extend to the very top of the chain of command.
