Nov 8, 2007
Screening of 'Ghosts of Abu Ghraib' draws mixed reaction in Wilton
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“This film will make you uncomfortable,” warned Allan Katz, retired political science professor at Fairfield University, to an audience of about 35 at the Friends Meeting House on a rainy evening last Friday. “Uncomfortable” turned out to be an understatement for viewers who had a variety of reactions to issues brought out by the film.
The film was “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” a documentary by Rory Kennedy describing the horrific activities in the infamous detainee prison in Iraq. The film released earlier this year was said to be the first to have interviews with both guards and prisoners.
The presentation was co-sponsored by a trio of local and area congregations: The Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, the Social Justice Council of the Unitarian Church in Westport and the Wilton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers.) It was part of a national religious campaign: “Torture is a moral issue.” The film was being shown across the country last week. It exposed recent American redefinitions of acceptable torture, an issue that has become one of debate among several presidential candidates.
“What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed?” the national “Spotlight on Torture” campaign asked. In 1949, when international protocols on the treatment of prisoners of war were revised, the Geneva Conventions stated that prisoners of war must be treated humanely. By 2002, the agreements had been reinterpreted by the current U.S. administration. Detainees were considered “unlawful combatants,” not prisoners of war, and therefore the rules didn’t necessarily apply, administration officials said. “Alternative interrogation techniques” were to be permitted, but weren’t described in detail.
The film showed naked detainees, shackled, sandbags on their heads, forced into obscene, unbearable positions, deprived of sleep, in bare cells.
In the film prison guards, young American men and women, described their situation. There was no training. There was panic about the lack of intelligence. At one point, there were more than 6,000 detainees including some nine-year-old children in prison. The prison was shelled every day. There was psychological and physical torture. The total number of deaths was unknown.
When the detainees rioted, General Geoffrey D. Miller, who commanded the U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq, was sent to Iraq and told to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib, and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld advised harsher methods to acquire information. The administration policy made a distinction between torture and cruel, degrading methods of questioning detainees. “Accidentally,” the film claims, pictures of extreme torture with smiling prison guards were leaked. The Army declared that “nothing had been authorized.” The low-ranking prison guards were punished. General Miller was given the Medal of Honor and entered in the Hall of Heroes.
The film ended with the statement that the detainees were finally released and no helpful information had been obtained from them.
In the discussion after the film, Professor Katz started by saying that the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib “blurs the difference between us and the terrorists.”
One woman in the audience asked: “What purpose did the release of the pictures have? Nothing’s been done except Americans are hated more.”
A World War II veteran spoke up. “War is a mess. It separates people from humanity.” A Vietnam vet added that there are no rules in war, “it’s beyond hell. Nobody comes back feeling clean.”
Several viewers mentioned that this war is not being felt by most Americans, who are still going about enjoying their lives while troops fight and die overseas. There’s no draft and so the same troops are being deployed and redeployed. There are also mercenaries who are being paid to fight.
“We don’t ask enough questions. We accept easy answers,” one man remarked. “We should have thoroughly investigated what happened on 9/11 to know our enemy and not just recklessly go to war.”
A woman in the audience described her personal reaction to the film as “fearful.” “Looking at the movie, I thought that I could be one of those guards. Would I follow orders the way they did, even though I felt they were wrong?”
“When people are subjected to accepted authority, they will do what they are commanded to do,” Professor Katz said.
© Copyright 2008 by Hersam Acorn Newspapers
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