Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

Last night a group of conscientious folk gathered at the Library to view a DVD titled Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. Directed by Rory Kennedy, the documentary took us inside Abu Ghraib itself as well as inside the minds of some of the soldiers who were assigned to work there including those who served time for their involvement in the infamous scenes that brought to light that rip in our national moral fabric.

It was a gripping, fact-filled, and rather unpleasant 78 minutes of viewing time. The marines who had served there spoke first of the uses Saddam Hassein had made of the facility. They showed us the gallows where 80 to 100 people were hanged every day under his iron fist. They told us about sleeping in a room that also held crematoriums for the disposal of the bodies. They spoke, as gloomy footage showed us the dank halls of the prison, of their fear of walking those halls at night; their sense of the presence of all those lost souls wandering in anger.

They spoke, too, of the ways their experience as guards at the American run prison somehow twisted them from the caring citizens they were when they arrived into the kind of people who could commit atrocities on other people. Using documents issued by Donald Rumsfeld and the Justice Department, and discussing the attitudes of their officers, these soldiers painted a picture worthy of Van Gogh in his deepest depressions.

Questions that rose in the minds of the viewers included wondering whether, given the same circumstances, they, too, would turn into the kind of merciless robots these fine young men and women told us they had become. How thick (or thin) is the veneer of civilization that keeps us from persecuting one another? What is the psychological vein of sadism that runs not so very deep within the human psyche? Why does it respond to negative leadership as strongly as it does, so that it allows a culture like the Germans of 1939 or the Americans of 2007 to at best ignore and worst approve of the kind of inhuman treatment our soldiers are giving daily to those incarcerated in inhumane prisons of our making around the world?

As the movie made clear, such policies are not created by the boots on the ground. The policies and the attitudes that create or allow them are made by higher ups – the Donald Rumsfelds, dick Cheneys and George W. Bushes of the world.

The pictures that so shocked us in 2004 are no longer at the forefront of our national consciousness. Instead, we have presidential caucuses about to take place in a state (Iowa) where polls earlier this week showed that 80% of the registered Republicans approve of the job being done by Mr. Bush and his administration. Who would ever have thought that such moral decay would overtake the land of the free; the home of the brave; the nation that saved the world from the brutality of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?

The great irony we discussed last night is that all this has taken place during the era of strong resurgence of evangelical Christianity. I was reminded of Thoms Paine’s imprecation, “You can generally depend upon a good man to do good things, and an evil man to do evil things, but it takes religion to make a good man do evil things.”


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle