Anonymity from superiors’ approval converts abuse into sanctioned duty

Evidence

The interrogators from military intelligence (MI), the CIA, and the FBI became collective sanitizers and approved the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison under a shroud of anonymity. As we saw in chapter 2, Lynndie England, one of the prison guards, described the tacit and explicit sanctioning conditions: “But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, “Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up,” you think you must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered” The abuses occurred in a prison with all types of authorizers but no clear line of authority. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2406

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates social proof and diffusion of responsibility mechanisms that corroborate the vault’s claims about how institutional authority makes people rationalize harmful policy. Ties to Milgram-style authority dynamics in the existing authoritarianism claims. — connects to: Diffuse authority legitimized abuse while incriminating no one.
• ADDENDUM: The Abu Ghraib approvals pattern parallels the institutional dressing/corruption ethos pieces where authority tacitly endorses what formal policy disavows.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2406