Ghosts of Abu Ghraib was a difficult movie to watch. I can’t believe what a terrible situation these soldiers were put in. I am so thankful that I don’t have to do what they do.

First off it’s hard for me to make any kind of verdict about these soldiers because I am not and was not in their situation. To be able to leave the life we have always known in America, our family, our friends, and go to war on the other side of the world I think you have to be in a certain mindset to be able to cope. Clearly this mindset includes a hardened heart and some kind of hatred for the opposing side. Simply kill or be killed. It would be necessary to have this mindset to survive over in Iraq. Therefore I can’t possibly sit in comfortable old Hartford, Connecticut and point fingers at anyone. That’s exactly what Donald Rumsfeld did to these soldiers. First he sent a memo approving the harshest torture techniques since the country’s creation, basically telling these soldiers to “keep up the good work”. But then when the pictures leaked, Donald Rumsfeld himself accused these soldiers of sadistic activity, stabbing them in the back and calling what they did shameful, putting these soldiers on trial and in jail.

Now I know what’s ethical and what’s not. The prisoners in Abu Ghraib should have never been treated the way they were. They should never have been violated and debased by the prison guards. No living human being should ever be dishonored in the way that they were, this is unethical. But it happens. It happens because these soldiers are thousands of miles away and they are fighting an ambiguous conflict in a foreign land where everyone could be an enemy. To these soldiers everyone could be an enemy because we don’t know who isn’t an enemy, who isn’t in Al Qaeda, and who isn’t interested in distressing Americans. They must take this very grey area and try to do their best to divide in into black and white and somewhere between this division they got mixed up dividing duty from morals.

When the whole reason you are in a foreign land is to defend your own country, to interrogate prisoners to try and find some evidence to protect your country from getting attacked I think one could get carried away and forget to question if what they are doing is morally acceptable. It’s elementary but I think sometimes we all forget it is better to be kind than to be right. But then again, it’s easy to be a hero from the comfort of your living room but when faced with the actual situation, one might respond differently than originally anticipated.

The last thing I have to say is that I don’t agree with this war. I think we should work on democracy in our own country before we go stick our nose in someone else’s desert. Our government right now is a total bureaucracy. It’s not fair that the rich WASP government figures get to sit tight in Washington and make all the decisions exclusively for their benefit and try to pass them off on the American citizens as if they had our best intentions in mind. Like how Rumsfeld totally backstabbed the soldiers at Abu Ghraib as soon as the pictures leaked and sided against them and sent most of them to jail when it was he who advocated the torture tactics they implemented. Meanwhile General Miller got promoted after the scandal leaked at Abu Ghraib even though it was Miller who recommended that the military prison guards abuse the prisoners. It’s a disgraceful system in America where the top 1 percentile keeps getting richer and can be absolved from their delinquencies because their fathers are friends with the governor, or they have money. And its even more upsetting to me that there’s nothing the 99% of the rest of us can do about it. God bless America.