Re. Abu Ghraib - this is timely:
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But Karpinski, a seething presence in the film, says she didn’t know what was going on, and it’s easy to believe her. The low-ranking enlisted personnel, meanwhile, keep blaming the abuses on a vague “they” somewhere between them and Karpinski, or resort to the passive voice: This was being done, we keep hearing. But the soldiers in the film can’t come up with the names of anyone who ordered them to do the things they did, or even who knew what they were doing.
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The great liberal construction of Abu Ghraib is that it proves America is the bad guy, in this war and maybe in general, but when you look closely at the events, you get tripped up by a lot of other liberal truisms. “Standard Operating Procedure” is a story of the poor, the uneducated, women and gays—and the awful things they did. Harman, for instance, a gay soldier who, though sensitive—she wouldn’t allow her fellow soldiers to kill a cricket that was annoying them—and spiritually wounded by the experience, is also seen flashing a brilliant smile and a thumbs up while posing next to a horribly roasted cadaver.
It turns out she is the one who told “Gilligan,” the infamous hooded prisoner who was forced to stand on a box, that he would be electrocuted via the wires attached to his fingertips if he stepped off the box. So it turns out the most “iconic” image of American nastiness, the one used to sell T-shirts and coffee-table books was the product of a kind, thoughtful, working-class, soft-spoken young lesbian and two other low-ranking soldiers (staff sergeant Ivan Frederick and corporal Charles Graner, both of whom were not interviewed for the film and perhaps as a result come off especially badly. Graner is still in prison, serving a ten-year sentence.)
Moreover, one message of “Standard Operating Procedure” is that there may be much more to the photograph than the photograph. In no case is this more true than in the most famous picture. Gilligan was only made to stand on the box for “ten or fifteen minutes,” apparently didn’t take the electrocution threat seriously, soon laughed about it, and subsequently became a model prisoner and even palled around with Harman and fellow soldier Megan Ambuhl. “He was just a funny, funny guy,” Harman says. “If you’re going to take someone home, I would definitely have taken him.” So the smokingest of smoking guns turns out to be . . . a water pistol.
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