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MaximsNews
Columnist Rory Kennedy
Available
for Media Interviews:
RoryKennedy@MaximsNews.com
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Rory
Kennedy, co-founder and co-president of
Moxie Firecracker Films, is one of America's most
prolific independent documentary filmmakers on
poverty, domestic abuse, human rights and AIDS.
She
is the daughter of the late Sen. Robert F.
Kennedy and is a Contributor to MaximsNews.com,
An Independent Voice from the U.N.
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TONIGHT on HBO: GHOSTS OF ABU GHRAIB by RORY KENNEDY, 22 FEB. 9:30
PM ET
UNITED NATIONS - /
www.MaximsNews.com,
UN/ - 22 February 2007 -- The
disturbing pictures of torture at Iraq’s Abu
Ghraib prison raise many troubling questions:
How did torture become an accepted
practice at Abu Ghraib?
Did U.S. government policies make it
possible?
How
much damage has the aftermath of Abu Ghraib had
on America’s credibility as a defender of
freedom and human rights around the world?
Acclaimed
filmmaker Rory Kennedy (HBO’s “Indian Point:
Imagining the Unimaginable”) looks
beyond the headlines to investigate the
psychological and political context in which
torture occurred when the powerful documentary GHOSTS
OF ABU GHRAIB debuts THURSDAY, FEB. 22
(9:30-11:00 p.m. ET/PT) exclusively on HBO.
Other
HBO playdates:
Feb. 26 (12:15 a.m.) and March 6 (10:00
p.m.), 12 (12:05 a.m.) and 21 (4:25 a.m.).
HBO2 playdate:
Feb. 28 (10:15 p.m.).
“How could ordinary American soldiers
come to engage in such monstrous acts?”
Kennedy asks.
“What policies were put into place that
allowed this behavior to flourish while
protections granted to prisoners under the
Geneva Conventions were ignored?”
“These
photographs from Abu Ghraib have come to define
the United States,” says Scott Horton,
chairman, Committee on International Law, NYC
Bar Association.
“The U.S., which was viewed as
certainly one of the principal advocates of
human rights and…the dignity of human beings
in the world, suddenly is viewed as a principle
expositor of torture.”
For
the first time, GHOSTS OF ABU GHRAIB features
both the voices of Iraqi victims (interviewed in
Turkey after arduous attempts to meet with them)
and guards directly involved in torture at the
prison. Conducted
by Kennedy, these remarkably candid, in-depth
interviews shed light on the abuses in an
unprecedented manner.
Interviewees
include:
Individuals
at Abu Ghraib
U.S. Army Brigadier
General and Iraqi prison commander Janis
Karpinski (since demoted to colonel and now
retired)
Abu Ghraib
detainees (names withheld)
MP Joseph Darby,
the first to alert U.S. Army investigators to
the photos
Court-martialed
abusers: MPs
Sabrina Harman, Megan
Ambuhl and Javal
Davis,
and Military Intelligence corpsman Roman Krol
Witnesses
to abuse: MP
Ken Davis and Military Intelligence personnel
Tony Lagouranis, Samuel Provance and Israel
Rivera
Experts
John
Yoo, Office of Legal Counsel, Department of
Justice, 2001-2003
Alberto
Mora, general counsel, Department of the Navy,
2001-2006
Scott
Horton, chairman, Committee on International
Law, NYC Bar Association
Rear
Admiral John Hutson, judge advocate general,
U.S. Navy, 1997-2000
Mark
Danner, author, “Torture and Truth:
America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on
Terror”
Alfred
W. McCoy, author, “A Question of Torture:
CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to
the War on Terror”
Through
these interviews, the film traces the events and
the political and legal precedents that led to
the scandal, beginning with the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11,
2001.
While
the White House and Pentagon claimed that the
situation at Abu Ghraib was “a kind of animal
house on the night shift,” other on-site
participants and observers maintain that the
abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a general
pattern of a “gloves off” interrogation
policy that had been put in place after 9/11.
GHOSTS
OF ABU GHRAIB strongly suggests that, far from
being an unauthorized, isolated event by
rank-and-file soldiers acting on their own
initiative, the physical and psychological
torture employed at the prison was an inevitable
outgrowth of military and government policies
that were implemented in a climate of fear and
chaos, inadequate training and insufficient
resources.
The
interviews with soldiers who took part in and
observed the torture at Abu Ghraib show them to
be intelligent and articulate young men and
women, not gun-happy, sadistic torturers –
challenging what viewers may think they know
about what took place at the prison.
For the most part, soldiers stationed at
Abu Ghraib were not trained as prison guards,
yet as few as 300 of them were put in charge of
up to 6,000 prisoners, who were held in squalid
and dangerous conditions.
“If
there were no photographs, there would be no Abu
Ghraib,” said Javal Davis, an MP stationed at
Abu Ghraib, who was later court-martialed.
After
numerous investigations, 11 low-ranking MPs and
Military Intelligence corpsmen were
court-martialed.
Only one high-ranking officer has been
penalized to date:
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was
demoted to colonel and has since retired from
the military.
At the same time, other high-ranking
officials associated with the scandal have been
promoted and the chain of command has not been
subject to an independent investigation.
Ultimately,
the film raises serious questions about what
happened, why it happened and whether it was an
isolated incident, as
the government continues to maintain.
Using footage from famous obedience
experiments performed at Yale by eminent social
psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, the
film suggests that under orders most people are
capable of perpetrating inhumane and unjust acts
against others.
As
one of the Abu Ghraib MPs says in the film,
“That place turned me into a monster.”
Another remarks, “It’s easy to sit
back in America or in different countries and
say, ‘Oh, I would have never done that,’
but, until you’ve been there, let’s be
realistic: You
don’t know what you would have done.”
~~~~~
MaximsNews.com, An Independent Voice from the
U.N., provides commentary and analysis from
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(Jordan), HRH Prince Zeid Ra'ad Zeid Al-Hussein
(Jordan), Sir Brian Urquhart, Hans Blix, Amb.
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Kennedy, Ian Williams, Stephen Schlesinger, Sen.
Timothy E. Wirth, Marc Morial, Amb. Jayantha
Dhanapala (Sri Lanka), Amb. Pierre Schori
(Sweden), Amb. William H. Luers, Susan Roosevelt
Weld, Rory Kennedy, Mehri
Madarshahi, J. Michael Adams, Gloria Feldt,
Jeffrey Laurenti, Rodney D. Smith, Rory
O'Connor, Genevieve Stamper, Max Stamper and
others.
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