Royal Marine's Murder Conviction Reflects Philip Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect, i.e., the Rotten Barrel

Marine guilty of Afghanistan murder of wounded insurgent

Other 2 cleared. Given what was said why were they cleared? I don't understand why they were not convicted as accessories to murder at the very least.

One of the others offered to shoot him in the head which was deemed too obvious by another.

They all refused to treat him before he was shot dead in the chest.

None of them reported what had happened, and there was a silence statement made with reference to the Geneva convention.

It was inadvertently filmed and recorded by a helmet camera which only accidentally became available when discovered on a notebook computer.

How can the other two go back to active duty?

The barrel is rotten here and needs very close examination including the legal procedures and foundation.

Is British military law capable of coping with serious incidents? [Facebook]

@BBCNews Phenomenally good interview with Robert Fox, Defence Editor, Evening Standard, re Royal Marine's execution conviction of Taliban. [Twitter]

Well, finally, the whole process of why these extreme abuses occur is emerging on the BBC News Channel. Robert Fox brought in the scope of the understanding which originated with Philip Zimbardo at Stanford in his 1971 prison experiment. He was a 1950s classmate in the Bronx with Sidney Milgram who did his famous experiment at Yale in the early 1960s where he found that 60% of the population was disposed to sadistic behaviour to the point of administering electronic shocks which could be lethal. Actually, they were both in the same graduating class in their Bronx high school.

Essentially, in the Zimbardo experiment and at Abu Ghraib, the fault was lack of supervision. The other problem that Zimbardo discovered which impacted himself was that those involved became indentified themselves with the institutional objectives and lapsed on human grounds. This is what Milgram brought out in his experiment where the 60% number results from people believing that they are participating in a sanctioned activity. Actually, Michael Portillo redid his experiment on the BBC during the past decade and came up with the same 60% number.

Matthew A's questions were superb as always, but it is not valid to say that so many behave properly: only 35% or sightly more do so. Only a very few will actually report what has happened. None did so in this instance. Others stand around and do nothing for the most part which is what actually happened in the Zimbardo experiment until a woman psychologist visited the faked prison with its inmates and guards, saw the cruelty and reacted vehemently against it telling Zimbardo he had to close it down which he did the following day.

Exactly the same thing has been happening in North Kensingon for over 15 years against me with surveillance technology that has been unsupervised so that it has run sadistically berserk with intense torture abuse 24/7/365. I have been imprisoned and tortured, subjected to medical experimentation and surveillance technology R&D by large groups of people at whose core is the mother of the children whom I reported for child abuse in May 1998 three months before the surveillance technology was given to her family group to use against me.

They were thus sanctioned by authority to use surveillance technology against me to cover up their abuse as they went on to increase it on a widespread basis. They were joined after 2.5 years of this torture by US Marines (Res/Ret) in February 2001 with their most sophisticated surveillance technology. This included a Colonel Vine, Lt Harry Bird and others with them operating under the auspices of what I believed to be the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch. These were "Paul Winston" and "Mike" the latter of whom has clearly re-emerged in this environment recently.

This is a perfect example of this kind of a situation run amok due to lack of supervision because no one can know what these people are doing with the surveillance technology, and as a group, they behave exactly like those guards at the Stanford experiment and at Abu Ghraib only they keep getting away with it because no one stops them while they abuse me in the extreme to discredit what I am accurately reporting continuously.

Since this has a military aspect from control of the environment by US Marines, I would like to see Robert Fox apply his psychological expertise to this situation which has run amok for so many years with Lt Harry Bird USMC Res/Ret declaring that he has a beachhead and war office as he denotes me as the enemy and supplies the directed energy weapon, i.e., surveillance technology, on a distributed basis to the recruits in this environment. Someone needs to publicise this abuse to stop it so that it can all be brought to light before it gets worse by spreading. After all this is social housing not a concentration camp.

Zimbardo calls these situations ones where the barrel is rotten that then creates the bad apples. That's the answer to Matthew A's all important question. It's a failure of management and supervision which often times occurs in fast moving military situations where soldiers are left on their own, e.g., Casualties of War, from the Vietnam War or My Lai. The exact same thing is happening right here in North Kensington, and Robert Fox is not very far away just on the other side of Kensington High Street. Maybe he can get it right for the British public.