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.