Abu Gairb Response

I never really paid attention to politics and current events. They are important, but I never really liked talking about that stuff unless it was assigned in class for me. So when I first heard about Abu Ghairb I was taking a look at it for the first time. The interviews were set up in a way so that the person being interviewed looked like they were looking straight at us. It added a lot more drama that way. Everytime a person was on the camera talking, I was hooked. The way that the film was shot too was amazing. They revealed gruesome photos with fade in to blacks and fade out to black to add just a little bit more drama.
There were three cameras used when the soldiers took the pictures. The most memorable in the pictures were Ivan Frederick and Lynndie England. Now when you see the photo you can only see what is inside the frame, and your perception can be altered if the photos are cropped. Abu Ghairb to me basically was a prison. What’s really messed up is that I think they took innocent civilians and did terrible things to them. Mr. Elridge, my english teacher, painted a vivid picture in my mind when he explained about a particular torture technique.
This technique involved putting a bag over someone’s head and dipping it in water to make the person being interrogated feel like their drowning. I wouldn’t know what to do if I was interoggated. Even the Standard Operating Procedure seemed uncomfortable. They tied or chained the person to the bars of the bed or window, made them take off all their clothes, and put their own brief or panty over the people being interogated.
The documentary made a point that there are these young people who don’t know how to interrogate. I asked myself, how does the military train our soldiers? These people who took the photos represented America. It wasn’t the America that people in our own country would of thought: land of the brave, righteous, free. The photos revealed to the World Wide Web made America look stupid. George W. Bush had to apologize for the actions that those people did. Now I’ve asked myself, “was it a good thing for the photos to be revealed?” I think it is. The public needs to know what war is about.
I feel like war desensitized the soldiers in a way that they don’t know whats right from wrong anymore. Lynndie smiled and put her thumbs up in the pictures! When a person is being interrogated they have to go through the SOP, but to a certain extent. The soldiers abused their power. I feel like all of them conformed to the actions. They thought it was, “ok”. It is courageous if a person stands up to what they believe is right and wrong. I can say this because I am a civilian, but if I am out there I might change my mind. That’s only because war changes people mentally.
Maybe the soldiers were bored, maybe they thought it was SOP. Were they trained correctly? Were they raised correctly? Did their commanding officer discipline them enough? What is the concrete rules and what is right in SOP? There are still so many questions I ask myself when thinking about things like this. That’s the reason why I don’t like paying attention to these kind of things. They make me think about how efficient our government is with military power.