Photographer wanted to expose 'what the military was allowing
to happen'
Some of the most iconic images of the Iraq war came not from
photojournalists on the front lines, but US soldiers carrying
point-and-shoot digital cameras. In its latest issue, the
New Yorker profiles the woman who snapped many of the photos
depicting abuse at Abu Ghraib prison that the same magazine
revealed nearly four years ago.
Like many of the soldiers in charge of the detained Iraqis
at Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Harman had little experience running
a prison. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris report, she
and others in her Army Reserve unit didn't stick out at the
prison, "where almost nothing was run according to military
doctrine."
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The article, which appears in the March 24 issue of the New
Yorker, has not been posted online, but the magazine has posted
additional photos and videos to augment the report.
Gourevitch and Morris trace Harman's evolving reactions to
the horrors she witnesses -- "ricocheting from childish
mockery to casual swagger to sympathy to cruelty to titillation
to self-justification to self-doubt to outrage to identification
to despair" -- through interviews and excerpts she sent
home from the prison. In one October 2003 letter to Kelly, the
woman Harman called her wife, the young MP writes what could
now be seen as a grim foreshadow to the war in which American
soldiers are still fighting and dying.
"These people will be our future terrorist," she
writes one night after witnessing interrogators poking one detainees
genitals with a stick and handcuffing another to his top bunk.
"Kelly, its (sic) awful and you know how fucked I am in
the head. Both sides of me think its (sic) wrong. I thought
I could handle anything. I was wrong."
Harman and other soldiers told of taking prisoners' blankets
and leaving them naked in bare cells while temperatures dipped
near freezing. The New Yorker writers relay witness accounts
of bones being found inside Abu Ghraib incinerators and prisoners
being submerged in ice-filled trash cans.
She also told of women and children being held at the prison,
according to the magazine.
The youngest prisoner on
the tier was just ten years old -- "a little kid,"
she said. "He could have fith through the bars, he was
so little." Like a number of the other kids and of the
woman there, he was being held as a pawn in the military's effort
to caputre or break his father. ... She didn't like seeing children
in prison "for no reason, just because of who your father
was," but she didn't dwell on that.
The photos, Harman said, were
intended to "expose what was being allowed ... what the military
was allowing to happen to other people."
One of the most iconic images from Abu Ghraib is actually among
the most innocuous, Harman tells the magazine. It shows a hooded
prisoner wearing a prison blanket with arms outstretched and
attached to wires. The wires were not live, so there was no
danger of electrocution for the prisoner, known as Gilligan
to the soldiers guarding him.
Subsequent investigations revealed that Gilligan was not who
the Army's Criminal Investigative Division thought he was --
he was simply an innocent cab driver. His interrogators appeared
to have little regard for how he was treated before that information
came to light, though, Gourevitch and Morris report.
Another of Harman's photos
shows her smiling and giving a thumbs-up gesture next to the body
of a dead Iraqi man, a suspected insurgent named Manadel al-Jamadi,
wrapped in ice. Harman was told the man died of a heart attack,
but a subsequent autopsy revealed he died of "blunt force
injuries" and "compromised respiration," presumably
at the hands of a CIA interrogator.
After the photos were made public, Harman and several of her
fellow low-ranking reservists faced courts martial and were
punished with reductions in rank and bad-conduct discharges.
Only one person ranked above staff-sergeant faced charges, but
was acquitted of criminal wrongdoing. No one has ever been charged
with abuses that were not photographed, and charges against
Harman related to her al-Jamadi photographs were thrown out
(the CIA interrogator never faced charges, either).
Harman became increasingly unnerved by what she witnessed,
and said she would simply try to forget whatever had happened
the day before with each new morning. She was asked how the
other MPs could participate in the abuses without similar reservations.
"They're more patriotic," is all she could say.
