Errol Morris’s Abu Ghraib film has a certain redundancy with Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning documentary about the US military’s systematic abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and at Guantanamo Bay. However, the focus is more narrow here, looking at the faces, like Lynndie England, famously shot holding a leash attached to an Iraqi prisoner, behind the photos that turned prisoner abuse into an instant scandal. It’s slightly better than Taxi at explaining the thinking of the individuals, mostly low-ranking military police, who participated in abuse or failed to report it, but not as good at placing it in the wider perspective of what was going on outside the prison.
Hannah Arendt’s coinage “the banality of evil” came to my mind while watching this. England and others have a lot to say about what went down, but aren’t especially articulate about why. Morris leaves you to judge their culpability for yourself, but none of these people seem extraordinary save, perhaps, the absent Charles Graner. Graner, boyfriend to England and artistic genius behind the naked prisoner pyramid, was still in prison and could not be interviewed for the film. Janice Karpinski, who was supposed to be in charge of Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi facilities, appears to defend herself, but I was never quite clear to what extent she was saying she didn’t know what was going on and to what extent she was saying she was following orders. In any case, she adds only a little to the explanation of how it all happened, and there are neither military experts nor Army higher-ups to explain more about the orders that were given, and why. The result is yet another indictment of US policy that leaves much more to be explained.
IMDB link
viewed 6/4/08 (Ritz Bourse); reviewed 6/5-6/08
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