Obedience

There is a chilling paragraph in Mr. Ali Soufan's Op Ed (My Tortured Decision, New York Times, April 23, 2009: A25). He says, "My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques ... were instructed to continue."

That took me back nearly 40 years to when I first read about Stanley Milgram's experiments on obedience. In those days we believed that his findings would resonate down the ages so that no one would hesitate in doing the right thing even when pressured to do something wrong by a superior.

How wrong we were.


Sent to New York Times