A witness to persecution
Miriam Cosic; 21/6/08
Standard Operating Procedure: Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris, Penguin Press
Philip Gourevitch gives a voice to the small players in history’s darker episodes … A long-time staff writer with The New Yorker, Gourevitch caused an international stir with his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, published in 1999, about the Rwandan genocide. His second book, A Cold Case, about a New York policeman who solved a 27-year-old murder, was well received, if of more local interest. Both began as reports for The New Yorker. … Standard Operating Procedure is an account of the Abu Ghraib debacle from the point of view of the American participants who had tortured and humiliated detainees in Saddam Hussein’s old fortress prison and had photographed themselves doing it. The story and the now famous photographs broke during the 2004 presidential elections, which Gourevitch was covering for The New Yorker, and he assumed that they would trigger national debate, become a factor in the election, indeed become a defining moment in the US psyche. Instead, he says, “they became a diversion. They didn’t help us focus; they became an occasion for looking away. We became absorbed in the tabloid scandal of the soldiers and the pornographic nature of the photographs. And the photographs themselves got confused with the things they depicted. We ended up thinking that the act of taking those pictures was so twisted, we got absorbed in that instead of what the acts were.”
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23878223-5001986,00.html
- ” Forget the notion that Abu Ghraib was the work of sick minds,as the Bush and Howard administrations would have us believe. The barbarity at Abu Ghraib was known, photographed, condoned and even encouraged by many more including senior military commanders.” Raymond Bonner, The Australian 21/6/08
- “Contrary to military doctrine, the military police, who are only supposed to maintain discipline, were put at the service of the military and CIA interrogators”. Raymond Bonner, The Australian 21/6/08