Winner of Amnesty International’s Media Award and a Gabriel Award for long form documentary.
There is a dark grey compound – a jumble of concrete buildings – that sits on the outskirts of Baghdad. It has a twisted past. Abu Ghraib prison was well known among Iraqis – long before the U.S. invasion in 2003 – as the place of choice for the torture of political dissidents – – those who opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime. Today, the world also knows it as the site the American military used to torture Iraqi men and women.
Joshua Casteel served at the prison in 2004, as an interrogator for the American Army. I traveled to Iowa City, Iowa to speak with him — to find out how a devout Christian with a love of literature and philosophy found himself in the dank and musty interrogation chambers of one of the world’s most notorious prisons.