laura.fo

I watched Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. It was good. It included interviews with former prisoners, former guards, and the soldier who blew the whistle, as well as old footage from the original Milgram experiment.

Most interesting, to me, were the interviews with Sabrina Harman, the other female (besides Lynndie England) who did jail time over this, and the background she provides for the specific pictures that include her. She said she's always taken photos, of everything, her whole life. She said she always smiles for pictures, knee-jerk reaction, it's how she is. She said they got the thumbs-up sign from Iraqi kids, that it was habit to do that for each other, especially for the camera. And she said the picture of her next to a corpse was a man she'd been told had had a heart attack in the shower, and fallen. She had no idea he'd been murdered — "it was just a body." She's not excusing herself so much as explaining herself, and listening to her you can see how, from her perspective — not being on the other side of the camera, not seeing what we see — she probably really didn't understand the full gravity of what adding those four factors together would produce, namely:

Not that she was completely ignorant of it, not that she risked life and limb to stop what she was aware of and what she did understand — but the Milgram footage is relevant.

Overall they did a good job showing how impossible it is to view Abu Ghraib as "Animal House on the night shift". They traced the origins of specific torture acts and stress positions to Guantanamo and the Brazilian military ("and Israel!" I yelled at the TV — but it's not just those three; torture's been considered a science for hundreds of years, and the photos of Abu Ghraib prove _somebody_, somewhere, knew what they were doing).

My only complaint was that they stopped with Rumsfeld and the Geneva Conventions, making this into a conversation about torture, full stop, rather than a conversation about occupation in general. Assumption being that if we'd just had more controls in place, a better chain of command, better translators, better intelligence, better facilities, more security around the prison, more training for the soldiers, more soldiers period, or whatever… THEN this could have been a well-oiled machine, cue flowers-and-candy scenario.

But support for war was support for THIS, straight A to B; this is what occupation looks like in practice. If it hadn't been Abu Ghraib, it would have been something else. The folks in charge seem to be okay with that, which I find appalling, but almost as egregious are the members of the mainstream media who accept the "few bad apples" explanation and then turn to Iran and ask all the same questions they did about Iraq — does he have the bomb? would he ever use it? — without turning around and asking if the U.S. is actually capable of "installing democracy" (sic) in that county, not just when we're also tied up in Iraq, but ever.