Tonight on HBO, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib."
Although I agree with all the outcry at the treatment of the detainees for their sakes, I also see we’ve lost focus on the fact that we are turning patriotic American soldiers into instruments of torture and then dropping them back into their communities, families, and Walter Reed Hospital, all ill-equipped to meet the psychological needs of these returning soldiers.
Tom Shales says
It could easily be argued that it was the torturers and not the tortured who suffered the most as a result of what happened at Abu Ghraib. The damage done to the reputation of the United States was critical and criminal, and the torture that occurred can be seen as but a symptom of a much larger corruption: the pursuit of the war itself and the fallacious "evidence" fed to the American people to justify it.
The wider moral of the film is simpler and nonpolitical and painfully, poignantly evident: When you treat people as less than human, you become less than human yourself. "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" will haunt those who see it long after the final frames have flickered out.
One of the military police stationed there recalls thinking of the place as " 'Apocalypse Now' meets 'The Shining,' except this is real and we're in the middle of it."
The March 2007 edition of Esquire features an article by the lawyer who challenged the Bush detention policy in "The American Way of Justice."
The Ghost of Tom Davis:"[The] House [Government Oversight] committee has managed to take only 12 hours of sworn testimony about the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison." This is thanks to Republican Chairman of the Committee, Tom Davis.
Davis explained the Committee's lack of action this way: "What aren't we doing? We aren't going after the mini scandal du jour, to try to embarrass the administration on a hearing that's going nowhere," Davis (R-VA). Boston Globe.