Errol Morris interviews Abu Ghraib guards
LinkERROL MORRIS: Are these kids [locked up in Abu Ghraib] suspected of being terrorists or just…?
SABRINA HARMAN [a U.S. Army specialist who took photographs at Abu Ghraib and was convicted by court-martial for her conduct there, shown here]: No.
ERROL MORRIS: If you could talk about that?
SABRINA HARMAN: I don’t know what all of them were in for. We had so many from age 10 all the way up. I think the youngest one was because his father was passing notes or doing something illegal, but they held him also. I don’t know if the kid was involved, but he, he’s, he’s a little kid. I mean, he could have fit through the bars he was so little.
ERROL MORRIS: So how does this make you feel? I mean, you’re seeing all these kids...
SABRINA HARMAN: Well, you go numb. I mean there’s…You really don’t have any feelings. You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off. You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the MREs [“meals ready to eat”] to make their time go by better, I guess, but there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.
ERROL MORRIS: And do you think that there were reasons that these kids were being held, other than their mother or their father?
SABRINA HARMAN: I’m sure the older ones, like the 16, 17 year olds, they probably assisted in something, or the IPs [Iraqi police] probably picked them up for some reason. But it’s kind of corrupt there with the system because five different people can be in there charged for the same murder, and you could just wait there, forever. I mean, if your neighbor doesn’t like you, he can be like, “Hey, this guy’s a terrorist. This guy just killed a soldier,” and the soldiers of course would think it’s true and they would go over there and they would arrest him. I mean, a lot of that happened, but it’s just a matter of time before you can prove it, that it happened, that these guys were actually innocent. Because there are so many people flooding in, we just didn’t have the resources to get to each one of them in a normal fashion.
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There were children at Guantanamo too.
I think the youngest one was in because his father was passing notes or doing something illegal, but they held him also.
Jeebus. This is our country doing this - holding children as terror suspects because their father was "passing notes or something illegal."
I pray to god we see George Bush and Dick Cheney facing war crimes in the Hague before this is over. They have done damage to our nation that has undone every bit of good will and stature America may have accumulated after our noble actions in World War Two.
There was a time when other countries actually looked to America as a place where there was freedom and prosperity, as a place built upon the finest beliefs of The Enlightenment. Now, we're just a nation of thugs and criminals, pissing in the world's bathwater.
At a time when we badly need to have the civilized countries of the world on our side to create a union of nations that will address the issues of terrrorism, poverty and the environment, we instead have given away every bit of moral authority, thanks to the shameful behavior of our leaders.
Step one in regaining some semblance of dignity is to publicy punish those who have brought about these circumstances, even if they are the president and vice-president. Especially if they are president and vice-president.
Given at most twenty more years, they'll be thumbs-upping and anal-probing our body-bagged corpses as thanks for the excesses of this administration...
Here's a nice (and by nice I mean nightmare-inducing) article about Lynndie England, the Abu Ghraib torture pin-up chick. She seems to feel that the problem is not so much the torture as the media exposing the torture. The bad news: She and her still-in-prison for the crime husband have already spawned.
Abusing prisoners damages the abusers as much as the abused - psychologically speaking. Torturers are blameworthy victims, in contrast to the tortured, the blameless victims..
@ 2 PopeRatzo
I so wish so too, but "...The only person ranked above staff sergeant to face a court-martial was cleared of criminal wrongdoing..."
And yet we still claim that only terrorists are imprisoned.
you must keep the faith. Keep the faith. It was not always so and it need not be so. You can't save everyone but you CAN save someone.
@2 If you want something done, instead of praying, just go and DO something yourself.
I'm not familiar with the regulations, but there's got to be something that can be done. Writing to your representative to suggest you think Bush be impeached, for instance. And vote for a less crazy dude next time.
In addition to the A/V stuff at the main URL given in the post, the actual prose article that appears here is very much worth reading.