“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”

- Abraham Lincoln

Sounds like Abu Grab or something, doesn’t it? And this isn’t even a prison, rather it’s an elite unit. WTF? This is a problem you have to be on guard against in the military as well as other organizations where young people are in charge of other young people. Occasionally you will get a group of young leaders who decide they want to run the organization like a college fraternity, with them as the pledge masters of course. So they concoct all sorts of humiliating initiation rituals that they will claim are supposed to build comradeship, Esprit de corps and so forth. But really they just enjoy fucking with people and can’t resist the urge to do so. As our society becomes more accepting of deviant sex then you naturally get more people who want to inflict “sadistic naked sex rituals" on others (German society in particular has always had something of a penchant for deviant sex, eh?).

There is no cause so noble that it won’t attract criminals and lunatics. In fact the higher an institution is held in esteem by the public the more it has to be on guard against individuals who will want to use it as cover to achieve their own ends. There are people in every walk of life who are looking for an excuse to commit a crime. It’s an age old problem: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "Who will guard the guards themselves?" When the sorcerer was away the apprentice began to play. What always astonishes me is that the people who abuse their authority like this imagine they will be allowed to get away with it. That nobody will ever rat them out and that there won’t be consequences when they are uncovered. But I guess such optimism and such a sense of invincibility is in the nature of psychopaths, isn’t it? Eventually though someone is going to stand up to them and report them to the inspector general et al, especially in the military, as was the case in this instance according to the article. Anyway, having said all that, this incident, like Abu Grab, is another instance where the supervisors, the people who should have been paying attention and keeping this kind of abuse from happening weren’t, and should all be fired and /or prosecuted.