Analysis Of Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib By Rory Kennedy

The United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 was dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom by US Forces, but it seemed like freedom was the last thing on their minds. Abu Ghraib prison was an occupied Iraqi prison where the US Army held mass incarcerations and sponsored inmate torture. 2007 marked the year that a documentary titled “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib” was produced by HBO and directed by Rory Kennedy. This documentary showed the abuses and injustices inured to the Iraqi prisoners at the hands of the United States Soldiers. Although the guards at Abu Ghraib Prison Complex had personal reservations against the treatment of the prisoners, they were manipulated into authoritarianism by their overzealous obedience. The documentary tells the story of the

The first scene that these quandaries come to light is where General Geoffrey D. Miller, a specialist in interrogations, was sent to Abu Ghraib to help guards extract more information from the prisoners. The guards at the facility had been trained for years to follow every order they had been given, but this would mark the first time that the United States Army’s orders had directly conflicted with their personal convictions. This fact was stated by the soldiers themselves in the the interviews conducted afterwards. This type of obedience can be explained by Erich Fromm in his article, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem”. Fromm states that there are two types of Obedience one that is submissive to an institution or power, and another which an affirmation of your own personal beliefs (Fromm 124). The guards that did not agree personally to the torturing of prisoners, but obeyed anyway, were participating in the act of Submissive Obedience, because the conscience they obeyed was not their own. The guards actions can also be explained by Philip G. Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment”. In Zimbardo’s experiment, many young men were given absolute power as guards over prisoners, much like the soldiers at Abu Ghraib. After given few directives and told to enforce the laws of the prison, the guards at the Stanford Prison took only 3 days to

Many people state that they would be resistant to the ideas expressed by Milgram and Zimbardo and that they would stay true to personal conviction, but yet situations like Abu Ghraib still arise. As Fromm would seem to agree with, people should take a step back and ask why they commit to the actions they are performing, and justify it to their own