Abu Ghraib de facto U.S. policy in Iraq

And the iconic prisoner stood on a chair and connected to dummy electrodes, the man that troops called “Gilligan”? Nothing but a Baghdad cab driver.

That’s what the New Yorker says — with photos — with photos far beyond the original, in multiple slide shows.

The New Yorker story, not yet online but profiled here by Raw Story, is about the woman who took many of those photos, Sabrina Harman. From an interview accompanying one of the slide shows:

ERROL MORRIS: Why did you have this urge right from the beginning? Because it was so weird, or...?

SABRINA HARMAN: I don’t know, it’s just—It’s kind of hard to believe if I come up to you and I’m like, “Hey, this is going on,” you probably wouldn’t believe me unless I had something to show you. So if I say, “Hey, this is going on. Look, I have proof,” you can’t deny it, I guess.

Per Raw Story Morris and Philip Gourevich show how Harman’s perception evolved:

“ricocheting from childish mockery to casual swagger to sympathy to cruelty to titillation to self-justification to self-doubt to outrage to identification to despair” — through interviews and excerpts she sent home from the prison. In one October 2003 letter to Kelly, the woman Harman called her wife, the young MP writes what could now be seen as a grim foreshadow to the war in which American soldiers are still fighting and dying.

“These people will be our future terrorist,” she writes one night after witnessing interrogators poking one detainees genitals with a stick and handcuffing another to his top bunk. "Kelly, its (sic) awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its (sic) wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.”

Harman herself is neither innocent nor unscathed. Another iconic photo from the first lot of pictures to come out of Abu Ghraib shows a female soldier standing over the body of a dead Iraqi and giving the “thumbs up” sign. That soldier is Samantha Harman.

And, either back then, or still today, she “believed” in what she was helping do.

An undated quote in the Raw Story article has her saying, “They’re more patriotic,” as to how some people could commit such abuses without it bothering them.