Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, London 2007

Iona Firouzabadi
posted 27 March 2007

Think of young Americans and a celluloid reel of Happy Days and John Hughes films might flicker through your mind - sunny pictures of shiny kids with white teeth and good intentions. It's hard to picture Richie Cunningham or Ferris Bueller turned jarhead and superimposed on a backdrop of war-ravaged Iraq. But watch Rory Kennedy's remarkable HBO documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and you'll meet the all-American kids get who did get landed at the amoral centre of that conflict.

When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, Israel Rivera was taking an algebra class - a fellow student turned to him and said, 'Aren't you in the reserves?', 'Yes - yes I am', replied Israel, taken aback. He tells this story with an engaging smile. Israel looks like your little brother. He's young and disarmingly innocent. He has large and expressive puppy-dog eyes, fronded with long, dark lashes. You wouldn't have him pegged as a soldier - let alone someone guilty of torture. In a different American era, Israel's story would begin in high school and end in John Wayne heroism. In our time, his tale strays into scenes better suited to Stephen King.

Israel served in the 372nd Military Police Company and he's one of around half a dozen soldiers featured in the infamous photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Snaps of naked prisoners, bound, wearing hoods, attached to leads and electrodes, being hurt and humiliated by grinning young Americans.

Abu Ghraib still cries out a question: who was responsible? Was it just a few 'bad apples', a question of unauthorised 'sadism on the [prison] night shift'? Or was torture sanctioned by the State Department? Using a combination of archive footage and interviews with both the soldiers and lawyers involved, Rory Kennedy's film poses these questions against a backdrop of human psychology, terrifyingly reminiscent of Nazism.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib opens with footage shot at Yale in 1962. The clips are from Obedience - a sobering film documenting the socio-psychological experiments of Dr Stanley Milgram. At the instruction of the doctor, average Joes flick switches that deliver high voltage electric shocks to an unseen man, provoking screams. The man being 'shocked' is in fact an actor - but those involved in the experiment don't know this. They believe they are inflicting real pain. One man objects, but eventually concedes to the doctor's authority.

This is the frame for Kennedy's documentary. It prefigures our meeting the soldiers. Oddly, what it begins is the humanisation of these young men and women - they are not monsters, they are ordinary, everyday: us. Of course it's this that makes them terrifying. Javal, Sabrina, Megan, Roman, Israel - one by one they tell us about Iraq, about the danger, the heat and the decrepit horror of Abu Ghraib prison. For a long while you might not make the connection between who they are and what they did. For a long while it sounds like they don't make that connection - it's as though they are just recounting horrors they have witnessed rather than instigated. You get the feeling none of those involved quite understands their own culpability.

Sabrina tells us she's always taken pictures it's just something she does. And in pictures you smile, right? Sabrina holds up a photo of herself - broad, toothy grin and thumbs-up sign beam out above the bruised and bleeding body of a dead Iraqi man in a body bag. She claims she didn't realise he had died as a result of torture. She admits the photo might seem sick, but to her it was just normal - it was just war. But as this documentary shows, Sabrina was wrong. Abu Ghraib wasn't 'just war', in either sense of that phrase - it was neither regular nor honourable.

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is far from a polemic. In fact, in TV-trend terms, it's not particularly 'now' - it's not 'counter-intuitive' or 'authored'. There's no journo or filmmaker in front of the camera screeching out a sensationalist, skewed angle or seeking the limelight. It's so un-Channel 4, so not Fahrenheit 9/11. What it is is an utterly compelling, serious film about a big issue. In fact, it reminds you of Lawrence Rees' The Nazis: a Warning from History. Kennedy's film places a similar weight on research and testimony, displaying to full effect the power of the well-considered interview over the soundbite. But it echoes Rees' BBC film in more than just its form. What each documents is separated by over 60 years, but what both films tell of has far too much in common to be comfortable: ordinary people transformed by war, by orders, by acceptance of a misguided authority into players in a nightmare. What do we become when we're allowed to flick a voltage switch or be a prison guard?