Notes on a Scandal

This week in Edmonton, the Global Visions film festival takes place—that's an annual festival of socially-conscious documentary films. Here's a piece I wrote for the local alt-weekly SEE Magazine's cover story about the event: an interview with Rory Kennedy, who directed the excellent, Emmy-winning Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.

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Near the end of Rory Kennedy’s documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Specialist Sabrina Harman holds up the notorious photo of her smiling broadly and giving the camera a cheerful thumbs-up while crouching over the corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi—an Iraqi prisoner who was tortured to death in November 2003 while in American custody—and explains how that appalling image came into existence. “It was just supposed to be a dead guy,” she says matter-of-factly. “We didn’t realize until after these photos that he was bleeding in places that you wouldn’t bleed from just getting a heart attack.... There really wasn’t anything negative towards this guy. I didn’t know he was just murdered. I just thought, ‘It’s war. It’s another dead guy. No big deal.’”

“The thumbs-up?” she continues. “I got that from the little [Iraqi] kids. And the smile—well, I always smile for the camera. It’s just the natural thing you do.”

Was Harman (and the eight other U.S. soldiers immediately responsible for the widespread mistreatment and torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison) some kind of psychopath? How else do you explain such a monstrous disregard for human dignity? Even if you accept the notion that it was an isolated incident—the work of the so-called “nine bad apples” on the Abu Ghraib night shift—how was the situation able to remain unchecked for so long?

“I do think there was a certain level of sadism on the night shift,” says Kennedy over the phone from her home in New York City, the coos of her newborn child providing an unlikely accompaniment to our talk of human-rights atrocities. “But I think it all happened under a general understanding that it was okay. So if you ask who’s responsible—well, the people who committed the acts are, and they paid the price by going to prison. But I think the film also shows that these 11 low-ranking soldiers served time, but nobody up the chain of command served time. Which is a great injustice, given the amount of evidence we have that they knew what was going on—and authorized it.”

There have been multiple federal investigations into the events at Abu Ghraib, all of which failed to find a link between prisoner abuse and senior officials, but Kennedy argues that there still has not been an authoritative, independent inquiry empowered to follow the events beyond the prison, without fear of repercussion, all the way up the chain of command to the Pentagon and the White House.

In some ways, her film—which won an Emmy in September for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special after airing on HBO—is the closest thing we have to such an investigation. Kennedy certain comes from prime liberal stock (she’s Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter, after all), but her film is meticulously impartial. Like Charles Ferguson’s recent Iraq War documentary No End in Sight, her approach is functional rather than political—she’s less interested in scoring points against Bush, Rumsfeld or the Republicans than in pinpointing the decisions that led to this disaster.

Of course, there’s no getting away from the fact that most of those decisions were made by Republicans: the decision to staff Abu Ghraib with a skeleton crew of inexperienced soldiers with no experience as correctional officers; the decision to send General Geoffrey Miller to Abu Ghraib in order to institute the same “enhanced” interrogation tactics there that he’d used during his previous post at Guantanamo Bay; and the crucial philosophical decision that in the War on Terror, the U.S. was not bound by the Geneva conventions, or indeed any of several international agreements governing the treatment of prisoners of war.

“Their frame of mind was that they were dealing with a group of people that didn’t have a nation per se,” Kennedy says, “and who didn’t sign the Geneva convention. You had an enemy that was going to behead people and torture people, and the only way to fight this enemy was to do so on their own ground. Which I think really diminishes us as a country. Ever since George Washington, we have made a point of treating prisoners with dignity and respect—that has been our policy for over 200 years. And I think once you disregard that, you’re changing who we are as a people, and what we represent to the rest of the world. I think it sends us down a very perilous road, and it saddens me that we’ve continued on this path, even in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib.”

The film may not be flashy or especially “cinematic”—but with those still-horrifying images of Satar Jabar hooded, arms outstretched, standing on a box, or Specialist Charles Graner presiding over those piles of naked bodies at its disposal, it probably doesn’t need to be. Kennedy says the film’s visual plainness was by design. “Ultimately,” she says, “there was so much smoke and mirrors around this issue coming from the administration, that I felt people just wanted to know what happened, and so I should be as straightforward as possible. I didn’t want to manipulate the photographs or manipulate what the interviews looked like. I wanted to show the words from the documents [I quoted] in context so that people could feel like I was giving them the straight goods. So at the end of the day, I wound up with a pretty old-school documentary format, but it was as the result of a lot of thought.”

But Kennedy wants to see more than just thought from the people who’ve watched Ghosts of Abu Ghraib—whether they caught it during its HBO broadcast, at grassroots “viewing parties” across North America, or at festivals like Global Visions here in Edmonton. “I think the film is about something bigger than Abu Ghraib,” she says. “It’s about who we are as a nation. Until we get to the bottom of Abu Ghraib and address these issues head-on, we’re going to have to deal with the implications of America’s new reputation. A lot of the policies that were put in place after 9/11 and led to Abu Ghraib are still in place—just last week, memos were released that showed the CIA continued to torture people through methods like waterboarding, exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation—all while the Bush administration has continued to deny that we use torture.

“I resist the temptation to call people liars, because it’s such a horrible term,” she concludes, “but I really feel this administration is lying to us continually about these issues. And we can’t accept it anymore. We can’t afford not to do anything. The courts, unfortunately, are not supporting an anti-torture effort, the media has been really timid about revealing the truth about what’s happening. And so, I think we need to rely on people to stand up and demand we change the course of our history.”