Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
March 6th, 2007
The HBO movie Ghosts of Abu Ghraib has finally appeared online, in a series of eight YouTube videos. The film shows that this country has, indisputably, become a torturing nation, indeed, a murdering nation. All the top officials responsible for the torture — President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Generals Sanchez and Miller, now Attorney General Gonzalez, Attorney Yoo, and all so many others — were rewarded with promotions and honors. The military, CIA, and private contractor interrogators who directed the torture on a day-to-day basis were protected. A few soldiers who did what was wanted by the higher ups were court marshaled.
An important lesson of this film is that we only know about Abu Ghraib because of the pictures. There were numerous previous reports of abuses there, but they were not reported, not even dismissed, by the media, and the American public didn’t know. Americans, and the American Psychological Association, can only maintain the fiction that horrible abuse is not a routine everyday occurrence at Guantanamo and numerous other US detention facilities because there are no cameras.
One of Secretary Rumsfeld’s first actions upon learning of Abu Ghraib abuse, was to ban cameras in detention facilities. Any country truly committed to preventing torture should hand out free cameras to every guard.
The American people learned of Abu Ghraib in Spring 2004. They did not demand punishment for the responsible officials. They reelected the torturer-in-chief that fall. The American people decided to close their eyes to the horrors committed in their name. They thereby became accomplices to torture.
Watch the film here
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4
PART 5
PART 6
PART 7
PART 8
Entry Filed under: Film, Iraq, Middle East, Rights and Liberties, Social Issues, Torture, War Crimes, War and Peace
3 Comments Add your own
1. Psyche, Science, and Soci&hellip | March 7th, 2007 at 9:38 am
[...] 1. Years after Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, the CIA black sites, the US government is completely unwilling to specify what is and isn’t allowed. The only possible reason is that they want to avoid stating this in order to maintain “flexibility” in how they treat detainees. If you don’t call it “torture,” it isn’t. As was evident in the recent film, the Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, to leave these definitions vague is a recipe for abuse. As occurred at Abu Ghraib, it is also an extreme risk to US soldiers and others involved in detention and interrogations: If the boundaries of what is allowed and not allowed are not perfectly clear, those at the bottom can always be denounced as “a few bad apples” and scapegoated if and when abuses become public. [...]
2. Dr X | March 7th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
I had planned to check in to read your new posts for a few minutes and ended up here for 80 minutes watching this stunning documentary. It is a must see for those who doubt the administration’s culpability for the immoral and illegal torture of prisoners, most of whom were guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thanks for posting.
3. Psyche, Science, and Soci&hellip | October 17th, 2007 at 8:05 am
[...] on March 6 I posted the HBO film the Ghosts of Abu Ghraib in eight irritating You Tube segments. I have just [...]
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