I have seen but one picture of Abu Ghraib; perhaps an outlandish claim, but I believe an accurate one. Nor have I observed first hand or through various means the procedure of various ‘stress’ techniques such as water-boarding, sleep deprivation, prolonged standing, etc. My reasons are private, with intense intentional forethought about the things I will submit to and allowed poured into my mind, and if this doesn’t set well with anyone, tough; nobody sets my personal boundaries for my mental activity. I hold my personal court my way without regard to the media commodity set before me or peer pressure. If I’m missing important events in the human family, they’ll be missed. I do not pass judgment upon others who feel the necessity for viewing such material.

What comes to mind here is that I do not need to see the pictures of Abu Ghraib, nor various stress techniques for that matter, to understand that what went on there is a travesty, a blight, a disgusting enterprise in indecency that is not a failure in U.S. foreign policy, nor an example of failure of our policy makers, nor the general citizenry, nor a failure in the human animal. IMO, Abu Ghraib is simply a blistering, excruciatingly uncomfortable reminder of our capacities and appetites that seem to me akin to a disease, a malady where there is an absence of moral compass or empathy for reasons probably not understood by anyone very will, and highly unlikely to be understood by the patient engaged in the activity. Most importantly after the fact, it shows our abilities to either deny these capacities. For others, it shows our willingness accept their existence and to either work towards reducing their appearance in human activities or promoting and expanding their manifestation with intentional fortitude. By way of example, I will submit that a couple of my family members are still in denial about Abu Ghraib as a place of U.S. instituted torture and humiliation, I submit that it would appear that Mr. Morris is a person who would probably choose to reduce the appearance of such activities, and Mr. Yoo, Mr. Addington, Mr. Gonzales, Mr. Rumsfeld, et al. as those beings who believe these activities to be appropriate and correct, representative of reasonable core values worthy of U.S. foreign policy tactics. Hence, those who feel most chastened are those who would accept that the brutality exists and would like to see it cease, and so we remain largely non-plussed and angry with our various responses.

I have never seen pictures or visual evidence of the activities that occurred at Abu Ghraib during the S.H. regime, nor have I seen visual evidence of the various activities that have occurred in the regimes such as Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, the British occupation of India, nor the U.S. treatment of native peoples or slaves or women, and yet I feel I have some comprehension and understanding about the intensity of pain and suffering spread by these regimes. The necessity of icon is absent. Catholic nuns executed in Central America are not more intense for me with photo evidence. As a person, ‘looking’ at these activities in the judgment seat of my conscience(Hesse), I have some ability for understanding the implications without photo evidence, thus iconic becomes more than a visual landmark. I can believe without seeing. It is a reasonable assumption that I do not in fact see until I believe. There are a variety of simple experiments that seem to bear this out. I’m guessing this is part of the point Mr. Morris is making. That there is ample visual evidence of counter productive, wrongful, criminal, unethical, immoral behavior that has been bundled into U.S. foreign policy, but there is no ‘seeing’ at a level we can ascribe as critical mass for a change of behavior because there is no belief that this is a core value we willingly embrace, for whatever our rationales or irrationales may be in matters such as these. We may also believe we have little say in these core values, and thus divorce ourselves from them in a variety of ways: anger, frustration, bitterness, sarcasm, irony being obvious choice for the unempowered. Or, some may feel these behaviors justifiable, correct, and necessary.

For me Abu Ghraib is iconic/representative in the sense that it is a fiasco of indecency that is redundant not only in American foreign policy, but redundant in the human experience since organized violence began. To quote Jacob Bronowski and his opinion of modern war, “But war, organized war, is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft.” If this has the potential for ‘truth’ to speak to something core in the human being (for which U.S. citizens and Iraqis are members), then it shows a possible, though perhaps painful, way out. It explains to me that our instincts for planning, cooperation, and theft may be strong, in continual perfection from the invaders of Jerhico through the present day, yet not representative of our more primitive proclivities. Frankly, that seems counter-intuitive to Abu Ghraib and its lessons, which for me, and I suspect others, feel extremely primitive and genuinely, if not uniquely, human. The appearance of humiliation may seem more intense because we’re doing it and we’re fairly aware of it, but I’m guessing humilation has likely always been a key ingredient in pacification and conquest exercises for quite some time. Europeans, to brand just one group with a broad brush across time and space, did not invent this form of behavior, but they spent many centuries organizing its deployment around the globe.

Regardless, the appearance of humiliation, the way the planning, cooperation, and theft has been executed and the feeling and thoughts of being held hostage to these aspects of human capacity, is only one choice of many narratives. There are other optional narratives available, though I would submit that I would be incapable of embracing a narrative promulgated from mass media without a high degree of pondering, or a documentary film for that matter. A question I have about these activities is the following: can the patient, displaying obvious an disease of collective mind and spirit (in this case the patient is a collective group of people who feel threatened and have done much threatening and spread much pain and suffering), work upon themselves and recover from this disease? I think this may be a bridge too far, but if we could make some progress here in the U.S. with such matters, it could provide an important incremental step for the human family out of these problems. The U.S. is not the beginning, nor the end-point in collective human development, but merely one tiny step upon a very old path, for which many will follow. Perhaps from our folly, we can send assistance to the future, in forms like Mr. Morris’ films, and the work Chris does here at ROS.

Thanks you Mr. Morris for all your documentary movie work. I have not seen SOP, but I plan to view it.