March 04, 2007
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, a new documentary by Rory Kennedy, is raising hell in the nation's capital. Sparks flew at a February 12 screening of the film for Beltway bigwigs--among them Rory's uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham--when Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski--who was demoted for her role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison--said during a panel discussion that she had been "scapegoated." Karpinski then called Graham "a coward" to his face, "as cowardly as Rumsfeld, as [Lieut. Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez and [Maj. Gen. Geoffrey] Miller." Her comment came in response to Graham's assertion that Karpinksi should have been court-martialed, not demoted.
The confrontation will come as no surprise to anyone who sees Ghosts...Shot between February and December 2006, the film, in which Karpinski plays a leading role, documents the now-infamous torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and raises pointed questions about who was ultimately responsible for the abuse.
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'When I (Rory Kennedy) was doing the interviews with the Iraqis, I remember thinking, I cannot believe that America did this to these guys, how could we have gotten to this point in our country that we would allow this to happen? I've done a number of projects that deal with human rights abuses that have taken place in the worst dictatorships you can imagine, and what I heard from these Iraqis was on par or even worse than any of that.
And the people who created these policies have almost all gotten off scot-free or been promoted.
article: http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070305&s=enzinna
from Conscientious
>IMDb's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007)
>links to reviews via MRQE: http://www.mrqe.com/lookup?ghosts+of+abu+ghraib
A scene from Rory Kennedy's "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib"
'What's more effective? Examining a photograph of naked men stacked up in a pyramid with a young female soldier in the background, smiling and giving a thumbs up? Or watching Military Police officer Sabrina Harman, the woman in the photograph, talking about how the photograph came to be? Or seeing a picture of a hooded man chained naked to prison bars, or a flesh-and-blood human describe life at Abu Ghraib: "We listened as his soul cracked," reads the subtitles of one testimony of torture.
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...Mark Danner, author of "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror," offers this crucial piece of information: If the nine low-level MPs later arrested and charged acted alone as renegade "bad apples," how did they come up with a very well-known torture tactic developed by the Brazilian military - reflected in the iconic image from Abu Ghraib of a man balancing on a box?
from IndieWIRE review: http://www.indiewire.com/movies/2007/01/the_return_of_t.html
>cited in the review THE GRAY ZONE How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib. by SEYMOUR M. HERSH (2004)
~War is over if you want it.
Posted by Stubbornson at March 4, 2007 06:44 AM