The documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, about the scandal that
brought shame to a shameless nation, premiered at Sundance last year to
little fanfare and was quickly hustled off to premium cable. Despite
the fascination of chipmunk-cheeked Lynndie England and her notorious
thumb, almost nobody had a chance to see the film before it took its
place on DVD shelves, in a gold- and sepia-toned case that seems
purposefully designed to shove the scandal backward in time and
memory.
A straightforward film that argues that the responsibility for the
torture of detainees lies farther up the chain of command than with the
specialists who were prosecuted for it, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is
missing some conspicuous talking heads. Donald Rumsfeld refused to
be interviewed, of course, and Lynndie England and Charles Graner
are incarcerated in military prisons, but where is Seymour Hersh, who
broke the story and photographs in the New Yorker? John Yoo, a
UC-Berkeley law professor who helped craft the government’s torture
policy while working in the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003, did
agree to an extremely interesting interview, but it’s hard to evaluate
his position when there’s no legal scholar of equal stature contesting
his claims.
The footage that made it into the film is worth seeing, though it’s
not always coherent. Interviews with prison guards Sabrina
Harman and Megan Ambuhl—women were especially valued because
of their ability to humiliate Muslim detainees—are sprinkled
with so many nervous, defensive smiles that it’s hard to guess whether
they’re being honest or canny. (The fact that their interview clearly
wants to deflect blame upward makes their accounts even harder to
parse.) The less-notorious men are farther out of their element, but
they still feign impossible naiveté. Complicating matters
further is the fact that some participants—we’re not told
who—were paid for their interviews.
The most compelling scene in the film turns out to be a stock clip
from the famous Milgram obedience experiment, in which participants
were told to deliver electrical shocks to an actor who screamed in pain
at every zap. The men who obey robotically are uninteresting, but
there’s awful human drama as a man insists that he’s hurting
someone, that this isn’t right. Still, when the observer assures him
that he’s doing fine, he proceeds. 
