Last night, I went to a special screening of Ghosts of Abu Grahib, a new documentary that exposes the abuse and torture of detainees at the notorious Abu Grahib prison in Iraq.  The film makes the argument that, unlike what the military spin team would like us to think, the abuse was not caused by “a few bad apples” in the mix.  Rather, “extreme” interrogation methods—a.k.a. torture—was sanctioned and ordered by the highest officials, leading back to the Secretary of Defense and the White House.

 

Ghosts of Abu Grahib was compelling because it interviewed almost all of the soliders who were indicted and convicted of abusing the detainees at Abu Grahib.  These soldiers were almost all low-ranking and young, who made the claim that in fact they were following orders in the chain of command.  The only high-ranking official to be convicted was Col. Janis Karpinski, who has since become a crusader for the treatment of female soldiers in the military (as was mentioned in the excellent Salon expose last week).  The only offender who was not interviewed was Charles Graner, the supposed instigator of the majority of the violence—who was sentenced to 10 years in prison (the others received sentences between 6 months and 1 year for their participation).

 

Filmmaker Rory Kennedy opens the documentary with footage from the infamous experiment conducted in the 1960s, “Obedience.”  In this experiment, participants were overwhelmingly likely to cause physical pain to a subject if they were ordered to do so by a superior.  In closing, Kennedy says that as we have seen in the past, human “empathy” alone is not enough to ensure that abuse does not occur.

 

I believe that the military’s structure itself creates the conditions that would lead to such shocking acts as were committed by the soldiers at Abu Grahib.  With the combination of extreme high-stress situations and the insistence on blind obedience of superiors—how can we expect abuse not to happen?  Surely, Abu Grahib is only the tip of the iceberg.  Surely there is similar if not worse abuse going on at other U.S. detention centers in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and countless other sites.

Following the screening yesterday, there was a panel discussion during which the filmmaker called on our 200 year “legacy” of treating prisoners humanely.  During the American Revolution, George Washington insisted that British soliders be treated with “dignity and respect.”  I don’t think he paid as much attention to the ways indigenous peoples were treated during battles with settlers.  Or how about during World War II, when LIFE magazine ran a Picture-of-the-Week with the caption, “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.”  And of course, the horrendous abuses that occur in non-military custody, every single day in our overflowing prisons, makes me believe that the abuses the U.S. has committed in the War on Terror is an extreme continuation of U.S. militarism and the expansion of the prison industrial complex.  I don’t doubt that under the current administration, the disregard for international standards of combat and treatment of prisoners is exceptionally striking and horrendous.  But to invoke some romanticized notion of a better yesterday does nothing to create real change—which will only occur when the culture of American militarism (and the culture of the military itself) undergoes significant reforms.