I had a chance to watch a new documentary last night on HBO which I found later to be the first showing on American TV: “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib“. This is a new film by a ward winning documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy which takes the view through the process of how America came to be known as the epitome of a free society that advocates fair and humane treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) and then through the steps upper military officials and political leaders including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and even the president processed to reinterpret the Geneva Conventions and update the rules of combat to fit their own means to retain confidential information from “the enemy”. Then the film takes that process and looks up and down the chain of command to examine how those changes led to the rapid use of torture methods ( used to extract information from POWs, and why the abuse took place.
In the 1960’s, a prison was built in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi city west of Baghdad, and during the regime of Saddam Hussein it became a center of torture and abuse where political dissidents were subjected to agonizing punishment or death. Following the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003, the prison was taken over by American military authorities, and was used as a holding facility for prisoners of war and suspected terrorists captured by U.S. forces.
The stark reality of this presentation is in the statement: “If there were no photographs, there would be no Abu Ghraib, no investigation,†says Javal Davis, an M.P. interviewed on camera who was court-martialed and sentenced to six months in prison on charges of prisoner abuse. “It would have been, ‘O.K., whatever, everybody go home.’ â€
One of the scariest (and when I say scary, I mean a person in high power of the administration that advocates the further erosion of personal freedoms in the name of freedom to take control of other societies that don’t agree with our own… which in turn can be 180’ed back onto our own society at some later time) interviews is with John Yoo, a former Justice Department counsel, one of the architects of the Patriot Act and a staunch advocate of wartime expansion of presidential power. Yoo has been a fierce defender of the military’s right to use extreme interrogation techniques on enemy combatants and in Ghosts states:
At the Justice Department we did not think the Geneva Conventions applied in the war against Al Qaeda because they did not sign the Geneva Conventions, and they don’t follow any of the rules of warfare, Al Qaeda, if you look at what happened on 9/11, has no interest in following any of those rules. They don’t take prisoners, as far as we can tell. Instead they try to kidnap people and execute them on the Web or on television.
Further as he sees it, Bush and his administration believed they were following the Geneva Conventions…. Not only that, the administration took steps to redefine the words of the Geneva convention because terms like “severe torture” (something that is restricted by the signing of the convention), were not properly defined and too vague to be interpreted appropriately. The next step John Yoo and team took were to write a memo redefining what “severe torture” is and to be torture, the memo concluded, physical pain must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” (Redefining Torture?)
So now, the authorization of “information gathering techniques” such as sleep deprivation, stress positions, hooding, nudity and even some forms of physical manipulation, striking etc, no longer apply to what is determined as torture and per John Yoo and the administration’s definitions, are still under appropriate restrictions as redefined in their new terms AND still operable under the Geneva Conventions.
With The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Kennedy hopes to remind viewers that our recent mistakes have grand implications. Beyond Abu Ghraib, she says, the movie “is about America, and who we are, and the policies we’re engaged in. It’s not just looking back to the Geneva Conventions, in the late 1940s–you can go all the way back to the American Revolution. During that time, George Washington was faced with a similar issue. The British soldiers were treating Americans absolutely horrendously. Washington was asked, ‘How do you want to treat the British prisoners?’ His answer was, ‘Treat them with respect and dignity.’ Because if we lose our moral compass, this battle’s not worth fighting. And that has been the mission that has dictated American foreign policy for the past 200 years–with the exception of the last six.” (Rumsfeld Made Me Do It: Ghosts of Abu Ghraib)
Please, if you call yourself an American you should go see this movie – for the same reasons that Germans must all face their past with the Hollocaust, for the same reasons the white rich land owners of the south must face their past of the slave eras of early America and for the same reasons we all should look upon this behavior as disgusting and inhuman treatment of people, see it, know it, learn from it. While I fully understand the requirement to infiltrate deep into any enemy’s circle to develop meaningful intelligence that will save lives, we as so called “pioneers of a new society” should represent and hold ourselves to a higher standard than any other society or culture and show the world how all people are free and equal. Easier said than done, of course.
UPDATE: Also check out comments by Janis Karpinski, Former Brigadier General stationed at Abu Ghraib Prison during the infamous torture of prisoners, posted on Huffington Post about her take on the movie and the situation the military put her because of the fall out of the Abu Ghraib pictures and military actions there.
