Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past eight years, it’s hard to ignore the dismal human rights record of George W. Bush. Where can one begin when you reflect on the human rights abuses, violations of international agreements and government-sanctified torture policies of the Bush Administration? By intimately exploring the stories attached to the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib, our film, Standard Operating Procedure, helped to give us a clearer understanding of the prison which cemented our country’s anti-human rights record and image to the world. Human rights were systematically violated and our global leadership was marginalized because of our policies during the past eight years.

However, since the election, the tide has turned and things are finally looking brighter. President-elect Obama has already indicated a desire to reshape our human rights policies, including closing Guantanamo.

However, for many of the policies changes to occur, the new president and Congress needs to hear from citizens like you and me.  Human Rights First is has made the following a priority for the Obama Administration : the closure of Guantanamo, protection for Iraqi refugees, stop the flow of arms to Darfur and end torture of prisoners in US custody.  Help to make these important goals a reality by signing their letter which will be published in newspapers worldwide.  We voted against torture on November 4th. Let’s help to show the world that we can help to change our policies and have our country return to being the visionary beacon for human rights that we once were. takepart today to sign Human Rights First’s letter.

(photo by habacuc_1988)

What I loved most about Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure was that it was in many ways a “woman’s picture.” That is, the women, and their experience in the military, albeit in some very specific circumstances, was at the heart of the film. Their villianization, from Janis Karpinski to Lynndie England, from high rank to low, was one of the major crimes of Abu Ghraib and of course almost no one reported on it.

It was with little surprise then that I sat down to read Paul Rieckhoff’s piece in the Huffington Post entitled Sexual Assault and the Military: When Will the Pentagon Take Action?.

Rieckhoff, founder of IAVA (Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America), writes:

Almost one-third of women veterans say they were sexually assaulted while in the military. (In the general population, one out of every six American women has been a victim of a sexual assault.) Already, 15 percent of female Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have gone to the VA for care have screened positive for Military Sexual Trauma. But even these troubling figures may not be telling the whole story; experts estimate that half of all sexual assaults go unreported. [HuffingtonPost]

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

TakePart Gang:

Everything I Know About Climate Change, I Learned in the Fifth Grade by Martin Musatov

When Torture Is Condoned, Is FISA That Shocking? by Wendy Cohen

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Nicole Hughes:

Baltimore Woman Turns Tragedy Into Art

Why Don’t We Do More to Stop Global Warming?

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Andy Kondrat:

Foods You Should and Shouldn’t Buy Organic

Paper or Plastic? The Environmental Impact

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Jon Popham:

The Energy Independence Bill: A Filibuster Odyssey

“Bruno” Fools Mossad Agent

* * *

Gina Telaroli:

While Iran Tests Missiles, Test These 5 Iranian Films

Mao’s Out, Time to Capitalize On the Olympics

The Senate passed the FISA bill today giving telecoms immunity and allowing the government to spy on all Americans. Yes, this violates the privacy the constitution is meant to protect us from.   Spying…hmm… that doesn’t sound very American. But it also doesn’t surprise me.

This past week, I came across an article and radio segment about torture.   The former is a frightening piece in Vanity Fair where author Christopher Hitchens undergoes the controversial drowning technique and concludes, “believe me, it’s torture.”

And on This American Life, Ira Glass interviews Basim, an Iraqi national who worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Army. He talks about the time he had to purposely mistranslates in order to keep a situation from turning violent. And then Basim mentions the Abu Ghraib photos and how they changed the Iraqi’s perception of Americans. Before the photos were published, even if Iraqis mistrusted Americans, they viewed Americans as generally fair and ethical. But after the photos of Abu Ghraib were public, it was as if everything they perceived about Americans was a lie and it was even more difficult to believe we could do anything good.   Almost instantly, Americans were seen as less fair, ethical and evolved. (You can listen to the entire show here. Basim’s segment is about 20 minutes in.)

Does passing the FISA bill reinforce the perception of unfair and unjust America?

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A man who was almost undefinable - Hunter S. Thompson is the focus of Alex Gibney’s latest documentary:

While we mostly think of crazy and drugs when we think of Thompson today - his political mark can’t be denied

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Errol Morris has said that:

Memory is an elastic affair. We remember selectively, just as we perceive selectively. We have to go back over perceived and remembered events, in order to figure out what happened, what really happened. My re-enactments focus our attention on some specific detail or object that helps us look beyond the surface of images to something hidden, something deeper” something that better captures what really happened. [New York Times]

This is the thought that stuck with me through most of his latest film Standard Operating Procedure. Not just in relation to his reenactments or “illustrations” but in regards to the photographs in general.

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The TED 2008 conference invited Psychologist Philip Zimbardo to speak about his new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. His book explains that a “perfect storm” of conditions can make ordinary people commit unspeakable acts. WIRED magazine published an interview with Zimbardo along with photographs from Abu Ghraib that he uses to illustrate his points (please be warned the photographs are extremely disturbing.)

Wired: You were an expert defense witness in the court-martial of Sgt. Chip Frederick, an Abu Ghraib guard. What were the situational influences in his case?

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GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Under gray skies all but obscured by an opaque canopy and high concrete walls topped with razor wire, two bearded young men in tan tunics are having “rec time” inside separate chain-link pens. One jogs frenziedly back and forth in the 30-foot enclosure; the other is curled like a fetus at the base of a cement block.

It’s a dreary winter afternoon, but the scene could be any time of the day or night. The hour for rec time is one of the few unpredictable features in a day in the life of a detainee. [LA Times]

That’s just an excerpt from a great article in today’s LA Times that traces a day in a Guantanamo detainee’s life. The article goes on to detail the schedule of someone who is in the prison starting with their 5am reveille and their end of a day which is signaled at 10 p.m. by the arrival of the bedsheet. But don’t think this means lights out - prisoners have to sleep with the lights on, many growing their hair long to try and cover their eyes with it.

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“Taxi to the Dark Side” won the Oscar for Best Documentary last weekend, and is a brutal and methodical investigation of torture and interrogation policies in America’s “war on terror.” Over 100 prisoners have died in US custody, with the military itself reporting 37 of those deaths as homicides. Additionally, only seven percent of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have been apprehended by US military personnel. The rest have been turned in by bounty hunters, warlords, and others with agendas completely unrelated to the US war on terror.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney parallels a disturbing investigation into the abuses at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo with an in-depth look at the apprehension and eventual murder of an innocent taxi driver, Dilawar, who was accused of a crime by the very man who committed it. The film contains uncensored footage of the Bagram base and shows interviews with interrogators, guards, and other military personnel, while examining the roles of key figures in the Bush administration in refuting the Geneva Conventions and the embracing of torture as the weapon of choice in the war against terrorism.

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Errol Morris is set to premiere his latest documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, at the upcoming Berlin Film Festival. Morris, best known for The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death and 2003’s Academy Award Winning The Fog of War, is now taking on the abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. To tell the story Morris uses recovered footage, photographs and reenactments.

Morris, one of the true masters of documentary film, always does an amazing job telling a story without telling his audience what’s right and wrong. He simply tells you the facts, which often leave you in a murky gray area that’s anything but clear - much like life, especially when it comes to big political situations.

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