Torture is as the forefront of my mind. I'm reading Naomi Klein's compelling and wide-ranging The Shock Doctrine, as I've mentioned, which I wish was lighter so I could take it out with me on the train - although my "train book" at the moment is Fiasco by Thomas E Ricks, the most detailed book I've read about the Iraq war, which contains a whole section on Abu Ghraib. Last night I caught up with HBO's powerful The Ghosts Of Abu Ghraib, an account of the atrocities that went on at Saddam's old prison and put 12 soldiers in prison, or else they were demoted. This was a clear, unsensational, narration-free documentary, which spoke to a number of soldiers charged with abuse, who tried to describe why they did it. I also saw Rendition on Friday, the first Hollywood blockbuster to directly address America's renamed habit of removing terrorist suspects to other countries, there to interrogate them in what is now a government-sponsored manner. (The definition of "torture" was rewritten after September 11 so that only endangerment of life or acts that might lead to organ failure are now deemed torture: all manner of degradation, psychological tricks and abuse were sanctioned under the signature of Donald Rumsield, about whom I recently read the simply relentless but essential book Rumsfeld: An American Disaster by Andrew Cockburn. One such is making a prisoner stand for four hours at a time, to which Rumsfeld made a footnote: "I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is there a four hour limit on standing?", missing the point in a way that either suggests pure evil or weapons-grade idiocy, neither of which is very comforting.) And, to add to my current torture-a-thon, last night's Spooks saw Harry cross that particular line, in order to save London from half a million plague fatalities.

In Ghosts, we saw clips of Dr Stanley Milgram's film Obedience, which blew my mind, even though I'd read about the experiments he conducted in 1961. In brief (and I've lifted some of this from Wikipedia to save my typing shoulder, but it tallies with what I already know): the role of the "experimentor" in these tests done at Yale was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a technician's coat, and the "victim" was played by an accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the victim (supposedly another volunteer, but in reality a "confederate" of the experimentor) were told by the experimentor that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations. The "teacher" and the "learner" (apparently chosen by slips of paper, but both slips said "teacher" to guarantee that the real participant would assume this role) were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. (Read on, if you don't know the tests. It's astonishing.)

The "teacher" was given a 45-volt electric shock from an electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the experiment. The "teacher" was then made to give word tests to the "learner" - if the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing for each wrong answer. In reality, there were no shocks. The "learner" just acted a response, increasingly severe as the voltage increased. If you see the footage, you'll see that the acting was good, and as the screams increase, it's totally macabre. After a number of increases, the actor would bang on the wall and protest about a heart condition. At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment. But most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal encouragements from the man in the white coat, the experiment was halted.

In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65% (26 out of 40) of participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were being paid. No participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks before the 300-volt level, despite the screams.

There was, understandably, a lot of ethical criticism of the tests. (Probably from people who wouldn't mind if it was monkeys or mice.) Clearly, this was a very stressful position to put even volunteers into - I'm surprised Balls Of Steel haven't revived it (maybe they have, I only watched it once). The implication was not necessarily that 65% of people would willingly torture, but that they would if they were told to do so by a figure of authority. I wonder if, 46 years on, people would be more, or less likely to comply? Certainly the soldiers on Ghosts, male and female, as we know, blamed their behaviour on the stress of being at war, the need to let off steam, peer pressure, boredom and ignorance. Even though it was later established that 90% of Iraqis being held were innocent, these night-shift military police treated the prisoners as if they were guilty and this abuse, much of it involving nudity and a strangely homoerotic manipulation of bodies, was either punishment for something, or a way of preparing them for interrogation. One soldier, Sabrina Harman, said that she stuck her thumbs in the air and smiled for the camera in the incriminating photos of her with a dead body, and with naked prisoners in a big pile, because that's what she does in photos. She got six months.

I am haunted by the world I live in. So let's stop arguing about the merits of a sitcom for a moment. Anybody else see any of these films or progammes? Anybody else reading Klein, or the other books? Is it just me who's obsessed by all this?

Labels: films, iraq, torture, tv