SABRINA HARMAN: I can’t believe they murdered the guy. Just to say “Hey, lookĮRROL MORRIS: Maybe you can’t believe it yourself? I don’t know why, maybe it’s a curiosity thing or if they see something odd, they’ll take a photo of it. Somebody dead, normally they’ll take photos of it. I mean, even when I look at, I go, “Oh Jesus, that does look pretty bad.” if a soldier sees That was the extent of that one… I know it looks bad. This guy has family,” or anything like that, or “Hey, this guy was just murdered.” It was just, “Hey, it’s a dead guy, it’d be cool to get a photo next to a dead person.” We’re with a dead guy.” It wasn’t anything - I guess we weren’t really thinking, “Hey, SABRINA HARMAN: It was just to say, “Hey, look, it’s a dead guy. Here is another excerpt with another quote about the thumb:ĮRROL MORRIS: Why did you take these pictures – Graner of you and you of Graner? Why is she smiling with her thumb up in that photograph? Somehow her explanation, “It’s just something I did,” wasn’t satisfactory.
It’s fine to say that all ducks quack, but why is this duck quacking in that one instance? I needed to know: Showing 10 or 20 thumbs-up photographs didn’t really explain that one photograph. It’s just, I guess, somethingĪnd indeed I have 20 or so photos of Harman – from Abu Ghraib and from al Hilla, where she had been stationed before Abu Ghraib – in which she is smiling with her thumb up. Like when you get into a photo, you want to smile. It’s just something that automatically happens. SABRINA HARMAN: I kind of picked up the thumbs-up from the kids in Al Hilla, and so whenever I would get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands… So any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-upīecause it’s just - I just picked it up from the kids. In my filmed interview for my documentary “Standard Operating Procedure” Sabrina explains her thumbs-up and her smile: Get past that? The smile? Just look at it. “What did she do that is bad? Are you joking?” And then he brings up the trump card, the photograph with the smile. (I have thatĮffect on people.) He looks at me as you would a child. My editor becomes increasingly irritable.
I reply, “Well, exactly what is it that she did that isīad?” We are arguing about Sabrina Harman, one of the notorious “seven bad apples” convicted of abuse in the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal. “How can you say she’s a good person?” I am sitting in an editing-room in Cambridge, Mass. “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” I invite readers to offer their own interpretation of the considerable amount of material contained in the footnotes. The following essay shows how a photograph aided and abetted a terrible miscarriage of justice.
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