A Little Bottle of Human Obedience

I was in 3rd grade when the the stories about torture at the Abu Ghraib prison came out on the news. I remember seeing some of the photos, particularly the one of the prisoner in a black robe and head-covering. As a child, I thought he looked like he was in the Ku Klux Klan, so I understood the story as scary and bad.

My knowledge of Abu Ghraib never exceeded this position. But when I perused the documentary options for this week and stumbled upon Rory Kennedy's film, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, I figured this was something that happened during my lifetime that caused a lot of outrage worldwide - I should probably know something about it. It certainly opened my eyes to what everyone was upset about.

I learned that the man in the black robe was not in the KKK, but was a prisoner placed in a "stress position" invented in Brazil. The American soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib forced him to stand up and balance on a small crate as they attached wires to his fingers, which delivered electric shocks. I also learned that this type of torture was commonplace in Abu Ghraib, and this wasn't even the worst of it. In addition, I learned that most of the inmates were held under hearsay, meaning countless humans were tortured with very little justification for doing so.

Towards the beginning of the movie, one of the soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib relayed the story of when he first arrived in Iraq. He wasn't sure who they were shooting at, and his higher-up responded that "If it looks like the enemy, shoot it." The soldier commented that he'd never been out of the country before, so "everyone looked like the enemy."

A good portion of the documentary explored the question of whose idea it was to torture the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. We're brought through a series of different memos and conventions, some of which explicitly prohibited torture as a US policy, others of which endorsed whatever tactics were necessary to get the prisoners to talk. Perhaps the greatest indicator of Kennedy's opinion on this is the opening and closing of the documentary. Raw footage of Dr. Stanley Milgram's infamous 1961 electroshock study serves as bookends to The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. This study has been generally accepted as an illustration, albeit an explanation, for how susceptible humans are to follow orders given by an authority, even if they think they're hurting someone, and even if their conscience is screaming at them to stop.

The placement of this study at the beginning and end of The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib emphasizes its importance, and, as Kennedy intended, causes us to draw a comparison to Migram's study and to the repulsive behavior of the soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib. 

It's nearly impossible to watch or hear about something like the abuse at Abu Ghraib and not ask yourself what you would do in that situation. Everyone wants to assure themselves that they would act differently, and they would stand true to their ethics. In documentarian Werner Herzog's essay, "On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth," he describes an interaction he had when he took two people from a village in Shivakoreni, an area blocked by the Andes mountains, to a restaurant on a beach. They were so astounded to finally see the Pacific ocean, whose existence they had contemplated for some time, that they didn't even eat. They filled a bottle with the ocean water to bring back to their village to prove the existence of the Pacific, stating that "If there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well."

Perhaps Kennedy's emphasis on the Migram study can be drawn as a parallel to the bottle of seawater. The perpetrators in The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib are like the seawater in the bottle. Kennedy is trying to show us that the horrors of Abu Ghraib are true, and they were committed by normal human beings. All of humanity is the ocean. So if it's true that this small group of people were able to commit these atrocities against other human beings, by the reasoning of the seawater bottle, all humans are capable of doing the same thing.

This is what I believe Kennedy was trying to argue in The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. If he wasn't interested in conveying how obedient humans are, and how feeble our consciences can be, he wouldn't have intentionally placed Milgram's study at the beginning and end of his documentary. If the Indians from Shivakoreni claimed that the entire ocean could be understood by one small bottle of seawater, then The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib claims that all of humanity can be understood by one small sample of soldiers.