Der Speigel offers us all an intimate look into the experiences of two very different men – one a prisoner, the other a guard – as they lived through the abusive torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib.
We’ve seen the photos. We’ve read about the “bad apples”. We’ve heard about the terror. This article puts these lives on a parallel track as the torture happened. You will read about the intense reactions of both men and understand what it was like to be there.
The guard: Sergeant Javal Davis
The prisoner: Hajj Ali
Two men entangled in a hell that neither should ever have experienced.
I will not pull excerpts because the entire article is a must read in order to be appreciated. This human tragedy must never be forgotten.
You can read the full story, A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib, here.
The sadness wrought by this inhumanity is beyond words. The cries of injustice are deafening.
This was a must-read article. They followed the two victim’s lives in what seemed to me a plausible and unsensationalized reconstruction of the specific events they experienced at Abu Ghraib. It’s horrifying because you know it’s true. Please take the time to read it.
On the whole, what struck me was how hard it was for me to manufacture sympathy for Javal Davis. I can see the unreality of the situation, I can see how a young man is without a rudder out there, I can see how as a soldier you become an automaton by design. But what they were doing was so obviously fucking wrong, I cannot imagine how he went along with it. Sitting in military prison for failure to follow orders would have been so much more pleasant than what he went through.
The answer I think is that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that is the full story of this Admin.
Yes a must read story, and I might note, one, the story of the man on the box, with the wires attaches, wires ‘they’ said were not active, just to scare….I am glad to have finally read the other side to that story and I fully agree, how do you have a trial without the victims testifying.
He is not a moral cripple, an insensate lump of tissue with no capacity for knowing right from wrong, for forming his own values.
I am sure he quite sincerely regrets that the photographs were made public, and that he was identifiable, and that he will serve as a public relations defendant.
Javal also comes off as intelligent enough to realize that any system, any entity, that will order you to commit atrocities against another human being will do them to you with the same zeal, should they come to believe it is in their interest. Just ask Saddam Hussein.
I do understand that Javal made his own bed, but I also do harber some compassion for people like him. While I have never had to endure a job like his and while I would never put myself in his position, I do remember what it was like to be an impressionable teen/young adult.
While everyone is quick to condemn these young (and sometimes not too bright people), I cannot. I do think that they should pay for their crimes, but I also believe that their crimes were the direct result of their superiors. I know what it is like to kiss ass in hopes of a raise or a promotion. I can imagine wanting a job so much, that I will do anything for it. I remember high school where we did really stupid things to appease peer pressure or attract the teacher’s attention. In the army, such pressures are completely intesified. If they tell you to shit, you shit. Period. If they tell you to torture, you torture. It is all well and good to talk about how you would not do it, but when you have been trained from sun up to sun down and everywhere in between to take orders, it is not so easy to refute orders.
Their commanders should be called into court and ultimately, it should go to the top. This was not a few rogue soldiers, this was a policy decision, whether written or implicit, and the commanding officers wnd even higher should be taking the fall too. Quite honestly, they should be taking the brunt and not the poor (as in economic), uneducated peons following orders.
I am disgusted by what they did, but ultimately, they did as they were told by people who held their very livlihoods in their hands. These few people are being used as scapegoats and we cannot forget that.
how hard it was for me to manufacture sympathy for Javal Davis
But he is filled with remorse! He sincerely regrets getting caught!
This is beyond words.
Thanks for posting this Catnip. It is terrible and unbearable. I wish these stories were more widespread than they are.
Thank you catnip for posting this. I saw it yesterday on http://www.watchingamerica.com. If you’ve never been there, go. It’s definitely an eye opener.
I couldn’t read past part I of the article because I get such an intense, visceral reaction to this. Of all the crimes (using the broadest sense of the term) of Bush and his underlings, this is the one that fills me absolute RAGE. That these many lives are destroyed and our military and our country have been brought to this – there aren’t strong enough words to describe my contempt for the Bush administration for what they have wrought here.
Not to mention everything else they’ve done…and are doing.
Looks like an interesting site.
What a piece to read at the end of a long day: This day I spent talking about moral development and moral decision-making to my students in human development. I’m not sure I could bring them to read this. . it is the opposite of humanity. I wish I had seen it yesterday, I would have been in a better mood.
It strikes me, in the case of the soldier, that the as yet unrevealed powers pick the weakest members of the cohort to administer the most damaging forms of torture: those things that warp personalities; that create cripples for life; that make further human relations unspeakably difficult. Graner likely came to his actions there already wired or bent to act and enjoy what he did. But some, at least, of the others, were twisted by what they did. They did not enter Iraq with this damage.
While I do not let people such as England or Davis off the hook, I also do not believe that they are entirely operating out of free will, able to choose to disobey. Too much of military indoctrination is aimed at stressing obedience.
What is most terrible is that this Iraqi citizen saw the full extent of the weakest elements of American character. Arrogance. Willingness to ignore the fundamental rights of persons deemed “not us” (a tactic used with too much success even within our own borders).
I feel shamed by this. I have students from Iraq, and I have been asked to explain how this can be,the actions of persons who live by a Constitution that these students admire. It leaves me with a very intense form of the feeling I got as a child when I learned of our countries history with respect to this land’s original peoples, some of whom were my carefully hidden and denied ancestors. I was furious and sad and I cried, which I did not do much in our family – we were taught not to cry. And it is something of how I felt when I saw the unbelievably shabby school that my childhood friend Lee attended – I thought somehow he did not have to go to school.
Childhood innocence is a dim memory, of course. But recent events represent a horrible return to some of the worst aspects of the past.