Documentary Description
What was perhaps the most disgraceful episode in U.S. military
history is examined in director Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. By
now there can’t be many folks who aren’t at least somewhat familiar
with what went on at that notorious Baghdad prison in 2003, when U.S
soldiers abused and mistreated-some would say tortured-Iraqi detainees
(every one of whom was eventually released without charges).
Yet while those acts were atrocious and unforgivable, perhaps even
more troubling is the philosophy behind them. As Kennedy lays it out,
the United States began committing violations of the Geneva
Conventions, particularly the ones that prohibit torture, well before
the invasion of Iraq and the incarceration of literally thousands of
people at the dilapidated Abu Ghraib facility.
Employing the kind of linguistic tap-dancing often used by the Bush
administration to justify its actions, then-Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld and others defined their captives not as prisoners of war but
as “unlawful combatants,” opening the door for the use of such “extreme
techniques” as nudity and sexual humiliation, “stress positions” (such
as standing on a rickety box wearing a sensory-deprivation hood), and
intimidation by vicious dogs; while some photos of these activities
have been widely circulated before, many of the shots we see here are
much more explicit and, since they’re in color, considerably more lurid.
As for how and why these affronts to basic human dignity were
allowed, it’s tough to find anyone actually willing to take
responsibility. The guards who did the deeds, several of whom were
interviewed for the documentary, say they were under-trained and far
too few in number; their superiors say their pleas for additional
support were ignored.
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