Journalists, lawyers and psychologists spent Friday detailing alleged abuses of power in Iraqi prisons and discussing recent legislation decriminalizing abuses as part of the conference “Thinking Humanity after Abu Ghraib.”

Psychology prof. Philip Zimbardo, New Yorker reporter Mark Danner, visiting Law Prof. David Luban, Law Prof. Jenny Martinez, psychotherapist Gerald Grey and UC Berkeley Rhetoric Professor Judith Butler gave the audience a crash course in human rights, the Bush Administration’s efforts to escape legal and political criticism and the Senate’s recent legalization of torture.

Zimbardo, whose 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated the power of situational forces to turn normal students into brutal guards, argued that Americans in general and Stanford students in particular are not challenging the administration on what constitutes dramatic human rights abuse.

“I think students at Stanford are clueless about torture,” Zimbardo told The Daily before his talk. “I think they could care less about it except to be against it on principles of vague human rights. I mean one of the problems with Stanford — I’ve been at Stanford for nearly forty years — is that there’s too much sun; there’s too much beauty. It is hard to get people motivated.”

In front of a packed room, Zimbardo discussed the topic of his upcoming book “The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil.” He described how situational forces at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq converted normal, good people into the torturers captured on film in 2004.

“We have substituted social psychology for Dr. Jekyll’s chemicals,” he said.

According to clinical social worker and psychotherapist Gerald Grey, the government specifically used Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment to set up a system that would inevitably lead to torture at prisons like Abu Ghraib. “No U.S. torture is accidental,” Grey said. “It’s all planned; it’s a policy.”

The six-hour long series of lectures was emotionally charged — with audience members viscerally reacting when Zimbardo flashed images of Abu Ghraib torture victims on a slideshow. Earlier, during a question and answer session, a self-described Republican stood up and passionately stated his opposition to President Bush and expressed frustration at his difficulty in learning about changes to torture laws.

According to Mark Danner, the Bush administration escaped much blame for the Abu Ghraib scandal, in part because the images released in 2004 were shocking enough to make it difficult for the public to believe that the torture had been sanctioned. Quoting from the testimony of an Abu Ghraib detainee and from investigative reports and public statements made by members of the Bush administration, Danner argued that officials knew about the Abu Ghraib abuses and subsequently lied about that knowledge.

“Officials lie in the full light of day,” he said.

The speakers also discussed the Military Commissions Act, which President Bush signed into law last week, claiming the bill would save American lives.

Legal experts Luban and Martinez disagreed with the President’s assessment. Luban obtained what was perhaps the most enthusiastic audience response of the conference when he called the Secretary of Defense and other administration officials “war criminals,” under federal law. The audience began to applaud, but Luban cut them off, saying, “the Senate fixed that.”

He repeated that the Military Commissions Act granted the president authority to review parts of the Geneva Convention, removed detainee habeas corpus cases from the courts and exempted some forms of torture from war crime status retroactively to before the beginning of the War on Terror.

Martinez pointed out that giving the president this degree of authority echoed the “king’s prerogative” in British monarchical history.

Each of the speakers expressed palpable disappointment in the failure of the American public to demonstrate opposition to the Abu Ghraib abuses and the Military Commissions Act. Luban noted that the government’s human rights violations were accompanied by “pretty widespread public indifference” and Danner responded to an audience question by saying, “There is a sense in which this implicates the country.”

Zimbardo argued that Stanford students are also to blame.

“The responsibility of a student in a democratic society is to oppose things you feel are wrong,” he told The Daily. “But it all takes time. And you know [that for] every student at Stanford, every faculty member at Stanford, the mantra is: ‘I don’t have enough time.’”

Senior Galen Panger challenged Zimbardo’s pessimism. After attending the conference, he set up a Facebook group called “Stanford Against Torture” and has begun to brainstorm ways to raise awareness of the issues covered at the conference.

In addition, in order to make the information on the Abu Ghraib abuses publicly available, Continuing Studies has posted recordings of all of the presentations at the conference on the Stanford iTunes Web site. According to Law School Dean Larry Kramer, the Stanford Law School elected to co-sponsor the event precisely because public knowledge of Abu Ghraib is so important.

“Everyone who thinks and cares about law and the legal order,” he wrote in an email to The Daily, “needs to ponder and explore what happened at Abu Ghraib.”