Iraq week - recollections and thoughts on Abu Ghraib.
As something to an addendum to Wednesday's post, the New Yorker has conducted a sympathetic interview with Sabrina Harman, depicting her as something of a naive idealist who became desensitised to the torture and ill-treatment happening all around her. Her thoughts on the photograph of her and Manadel al-Jamadi are:
Very few soldiers however have photographs of themselves with someone who died while in their comrades' care apparently grinning and laughing about it. It does perhaps mitigate against the image of her that has understandably developed that she went on to document in detail al-Jamadi's injuries:
Harman throughout comes across as a victim, a soldier who should never have been, and one who has paid the ultimate price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if, as established by the Nuremberg trials, following orders is no excuse. Her higher-ups, and indeed the CIA officer that killed al-Jamadi, have never faced any charges over their breaches of the military code, let alone the Geneva conventions.
A very different image comes across from Der Stern's interview with Lynndie England. England doesn't appear to be sorry for what happened at Abu Ghraib, or even express the slightest remorse for her involvement in the ritual humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners held there. Self-pitying, and apparently not intelligent enough to to feel even the beginnings of empathy, the closest she comes is towards the end:
I'm not a believer in someone being innately evil; that's not to say that they are not capable of acts that can be classified as "evil", but that even the very few among us who can be diagnosed as psychopaths can have their actions explained without resort to simple wickedness. Everyone, regardless of the pressures upon them on that time, is capable of making a choice, which is why I find myself disagreeing with Philip Zimbardo and his analysis, however convincing it sounds, of how the situational always prospers over the dispositional, in line with his Stanford prison experiment, applied to Abu Ghraib in his latest book. However systemically corrupt an organisation or set of rules is, there will always be someone who resists. In this case it might well have been Sabrina Harman that was the rebellious one slandered and the victim of a momentary loss of control in taking that photograph, and Lynndie England, that along with the rest of her compadres, was the one that went along with the prevailing mood.
“I guess we weren’t really thinking, Hey, this guy has family, or, Hey, this guy was just murdered,” Harman said. “It was just—Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person. I know it looks bad. I mean, even when I look at them, I go, ‘Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.’ But when we were in that situation it wasn’t as bad as it looks coming out on the media, I guess, because people have photos of all kinds of things. Like, if a soldier sees somebody dead, normally they’ll take photos of it.”
Very few soldiers however have photographs of themselves with someone who died while in their comrades' care apparently grinning and laughing about it. It does perhaps mitigate against the image of her that has understandably developed that she went on to document in detail al-Jamadi's injuries:
“I just started taking photos of everything I saw that was wrong, every little bruise and cut,” Harman said. “His knees were bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. You had to look close. I mean, they did a really good job cleaning him up.” She said, “The gauze on his eye was put there after he died to make it look like he had medical treatment, because he didn’t when he came into the prison.” She said, “There were so many things around the bandage, like the blood coming out of his nose and his ears. And his tooth was chipped—I didn’t know if that happened there or before—his lip was split open, and it looked like somebody had either butt-stocked him or really got him good or hit him against the wall. It was a pretty good-sized gash. I took a photo of that as well.” She said, “I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos.” She said, “It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack. Look at all these other existing injuries that they tried to cover up.”
Harman throughout comes across as a victim, a soldier who should never have been, and one who has paid the ultimate price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if, as established by the Nuremberg trials, following orders is no excuse. Her higher-ups, and indeed the CIA officer that killed al-Jamadi, have never faced any charges over their breaches of the military code, let alone the Geneva conventions.
A very different image comes across from Der Stern's interview with Lynndie England. England doesn't appear to be sorry for what happened at Abu Ghraib, or even express the slightest remorse for her involvement in the ritual humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners held there. Self-pitying, and apparently not intelligent enough to to feel even the beginnings of empathy, the closest she comes is towards the end:
Mrs. England, we've listened to you for hours. And the whole time we've been asking ourselves: Where is your feeling of regret?
Looking back on it, if I could change it I would. I would have never met Graner, I never would have gone over there, I would have stayed in my little work area in Abu Ghraib, did what I had to do.
I'm not a believer in someone being innately evil; that's not to say that they are not capable of acts that can be classified as "evil", but that even the very few among us who can be diagnosed as psychopaths can have their actions explained without resort to simple wickedness. Everyone, regardless of the pressures upon them on that time, is capable of making a choice, which is why I find myself disagreeing with Philip Zimbardo and his analysis, however convincing it sounds, of how the situational always prospers over the dispositional, in line with his Stanford prison experiment, applied to Abu Ghraib in his latest book. However systemically corrupt an organisation or set of rules is, there will always be someone who resists. In this case it might well have been Sabrina Harman that was the rebellious one slandered and the victim of a momentary loss of control in taking that photograph, and Lynndie England, that along with the rest of her compadres, was the one that went along with the prevailing mood.
Labels: Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Iraq disaster, Iraq week, Lynndie England, Philip Zimbardo, Sabrina Harman
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