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Documentary shines new light on Abu Ghraib

Maybe she really did take all those pictures to document and expose abuse. Maybe her smiling face over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner really is a mask of sorts as she claims. And the thumbs up? "Whenever I get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands," she explains. In other words, it's just a reflex.
But no matter what she says, the face of specialist Sabrina Harman has become intricately linked to acts of detainee abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib. Harman was the eye behind the camera taking many of the now infamous photos of prisoner abuse.

Harman, along with Lynndie England and many other U.S. soldiers who were criminally charged after appearing in the photos, appears in the new Errol Morris documentary "Standard Operating Procedure." A large portion of the film focuses on Harman's recollection of events as well as excerpts from the letters she wrote to her wife Kelly while she was in Iraq.
Soon after arriving at the prison in 2003 Harman says she saw a man chained in his cell naked except for underwear on his head. "That's the first time I started taking photos," she says.
"Standard Operating Procedure" includes hundreds of photos, including the very photo in question: a brown-skinned man with bright white women's panties over his face, chained up in a dank cement cell.
Harman's letters to her wife illustrate her growing discomfort with what was going on at the prison, though they hardly acquit her.
"Dear Kelly," Harman reads as the camera pans a close up of the actual and written letter, "They've been stripping 'the fucked up' prisoners and handcuffing them to the bars. It's pretty sad. I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. I kind of feel bad for these guys even if they are accused of killing U.S. soldiers. We degrade them but we don't hit and that's a plus…"
Later she writes that things have gone "too far." She describes finding a prisoner in his cell handcuffed backwards to his window naked with underwear on his head. "He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh so I went on and grabbed the camera and took a picture. One of the guys took my asp and started 'poking' at his dick. Again I thought, OK that's funny – then it hit me, that's a form of molestation. You can't do that."
It's hard to watch this film and believe that what happened at Abu Ghraib was really the result of a few "bad apples" as the military alleges. That dead Iraqi prisoner Harman posed with? The death, which happened while the CIA was interrogating the prisoner, was officially declared a homicide. Harman was criminally charged for the photographs she took. No one has been charged with the actual murder.
While "Standard Operating Procedure" leaves a lot of questions about what happened and why, it does manage to keep this national scandal in the public eye and remind people that this isn't just something that happened, something to walk away from unscathed.

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