by Jessica Reed
Following yesterday's entry about torture-enthusiastic tv show 24, a Salon article contextualises torture in an article detailling the "Ghosts of Abu Graib", an HBO documentary by Rory Kennedy which seeks to "demonstrate how the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were a direct result of unprecedented changes in U.S. policy regarding what constitutes torture and how prisoners are allowed to be treated". Excerpt:
While we now know that the humiliation tactics employed in Abu Ghraib were first used in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Kennedy traces a shift in U.S. policy regarding abuse to the days after 9/11. The Justice Department sent a memo defining torture in more extreme terms than it ever had before, describing it as "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.
Also of interest, an interview for Frontline with Tony Lagouranis, a U.S. Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005 who served a tour of duty in Iraq from January 2004 to January 2005 and was briefly stationned at Abu Graib:
The pictures [of Abu Ghraib] when you saw them, where were you and what was the feeling?
I was in Mosul at the time, and I think I really felt like, you know, it really was a few people who had just gotten out of control. My first impression was "bad apples." But I got back, and talked to more people and thought about this more, and it's not bad apples. Because as I said before, these MPs were taking their cues from interrogators and CIA agents who'd they'd seen sexually humiliate prisoners. And I think if they hadn't seen that, then this wouldn't have happened. And if there hadn't been controls over it, then it wouldn't have happened. So my view on it did change.
Tony Lagouranis also wrote a piece for the New York Times, titled Torture logic.
