Tuesday, May 17, 2005

What went wrong?

A US military court has found Army reservist Sabrina Harman guilty of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.

Specialist Harman was the last of nine soldiers to be tried over the abuse, which became notorious after photographs became public.

The 27-year-old was found guilty on six of seven counts, and now faces up to five-and-a-half years in jail.

The sentencing phase of her trial will begin on Tuesday.

  BBC article

Spc. Sabrina Harman, one of seven Army Reservists charged in the abuse of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, told "20/20" she wishes she could apologize to the Iraqi people, but doesn't think she did anything wrong while she was stationed as a guard at the prison.
Total disconnect. Why would you apologize if you didn't do anything wrong? And what good is an apology in that context?

Anyway, here's her all-American reasoning.

And here's Sabrina (photos from Memory Hole):



Hardly the look she's trying to portray on 20/20. She says she just kind of went numb and doesn't really know why she got in that picture.

Harman's attorney said he hopes to see the military chain of command put on trial, rather than low-ranking reservists like Harman. "I don't think we can even begin to imagine the kind of environment that she was in. First of all, she wasn't trained to be a prison guard, so she didn't even know the basic rules. She wasn't trained in military intelligence. I don't think any American can really truly appreciate the stress that existed along with the fact they were undermanned and not trained to perform this mission," he said.

[...]

Harman's defense attorney Frank Spinner said it was Harman's desire to document the abuse that led her to pose in that photo. "You have to put it in context," he said, "She's taking pictures and then all of a sudden, somebody says something to her and she just joins in the picture. I think it was just a human reaction, a human response."

Sure. Just a human response. No culpability. Nothing wrong. Any human would respond that way.

And, gee, what about this picture?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. There may be some delay before your comment is published. It all depends on how much time M has in the day. But please comment!