Crossposted on DailyKos
This week 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:
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.
If you missed it, see it on the replay. Times below.
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.
Watch it on it other times (if you have HBO HD check www.hbo.com):
Claude Raines as Captain Renault in Casa Blanca
On NBC's Meet the Press today, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) argued that the Senate Armed Services Committee did not conduct oversight of the treatment at military facilities in recent years because "they did not want to embarrass the President."
Hat tip to Think Progress: http://thinkprogress...
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.
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."
Thu 2/22 09:30 PM HBO
Fri 2/23 04:35 AM HBO
Tue 2/27 12:15 AM HBO
Wed 2/28 10:15 PM HBO2
Sun 3/4 01:00 AM HBO2
Tue 3/6 10:00 PM HBO
Tue 3/13 12:05 AM HBO
Fri 3/16 02:40 AM HBO2
Thu 3/22 04:35 AM HBO
Wed 3/28 12:55 AM HBO SIGNATURE
- Comments
The incompleteness of the death certificates and autopsy reports suggests that Armed Forces pathologists supervising prisoners' autopsies did not have access to medical records, information about events preceding the deaths, or the circumstances under which the bodies were found to correlate with autopsy findings. Medical records were rarely created for Iraqi prisoners.[7,8] If available, field investigators inconsistently noted their contents. Field investigators rarely documented any inquiry into confinement or interrogation events preceding the death.
Levin: Last Congress Didn't Investigate Walter Reed Because `They Did Not Want To Embarrass' Bush