Michael Gawenda; 5/7/08
Standard Operating Procedure: Inside Abu Ghraib; By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris; Picador; Gourevitch is a staff writer with The New Yorker and author of the unforgettable book on the genocide in Rwanda, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.
There are no photographs. At first, this is a baffling omission in a book that is ostensibly about a bunch of photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, published in The New Yorker magazine and shown on the NBC network’s 60 Minutes program in April 2004. The photographs horrified Americans and people around the world and instantly became a searing metaphor for the disasters of the Iraq war. This book with no photographs is a collaboration between writer Philip Gourevitch and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, whose Standard Operating Procedure has been widely praised by critics in the US and Europe.
See: The Sydney Morning Herald; No Internet Text
Morris’s film The Fog Of War, an extended interview with Robert McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary who was one of the leading players in the Vietnam War, won an Academy Award. It is not clear whether Gourevitch conducted any of the interviews used in the book or whether he relied on the hundreds of hours of interviews by Morris, which formed the basis of his film on Abu Ghraib. But it is clear to anyone who knows Gourevitch’s writing, this is his book.
The decision not to publish the abuse photographs was probably Gourevitch’s and is, paradoxically, one of the key reasons this is among the best books written about the Iraq venture.
On one level, it is not a book about the war at all. It does not examine the decision to invade Iraq, the role of senior Bush Administration officials in that decision, the way they used faulty intelligence to make the case for war or even the catastrophically flawed postwar US-led occupation of the country.
Nor does the book examine in any detail the panicked and morally flawed response of George Bush and his senior officials to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
In the aftermath, the Bush Administration quickly decided the Geneva Conventions would not apply to prisoners taken in the war on terrorism, that interrogation techniques banned under the US Military Code would be permitted and that torture would be more or less defined out of existence.There are many other books thatexamine this issue and most are first-rate. Standard Operating Procedure focuses in large part on how it came to be that the abuse photographs at Abu Ghraib were taken in those few weeks towards the end of 2003, on who took them and why they did it.
The book examines the context in which they were taken, who knew about them and, above all, whether the photographs were an accurate portrayal of the truth of what happened within the walls of Abu Ghraib.
The book is a meditation on truth and reality, on what is hidden and revealed in photographs, on how reality can be distorted by pictures, and yet how, without pictures, without these photographs, what happened in the prison of Abu Ghraib in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq would perhaps have rated no more than a footnote in the reporting of the war.
As if to make this point, the book starts with Saddam Hussein’s release in October 2002 of most of the inmates of Abu Ghraib, the most notorious of the prisons during his rule – these “factories of terror and annihilation” in the words of Gourevitch, in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were incarcerated and in which many were subjected to torture with no limits, torture which made death the thing the tortured most fervently wished for.
There are no photographs from these Saddam-era prisons, no photographs of the torture and death of thousands at Abu Ghraib during this time.
As a result, Abu Ghraib will be remembered as America’s great shame basically because there are these photographs of abuse. These shocking images were taken mostly by the men and women who were the abusers. They were young, ill-trained and confused by the conflicting orders given them about the Geneva Conventions and interrogation limits, totally unprepared for the task given them – to look after thousands of Iraqis detained after the invasion, the vast majority of them guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Abu Ghraib, by the time the Americans invaded, consisted of little more than vermin-infested, ruined buildings. There had been no planning for what to do with detainees and prisoners and Abu Ghraib became the country’s largest prison basically because there were no alternatives.
Nightly mortar and grenade attacks terrified not just the American military police units who ran the prison but the Iraqi detainees, many of whom were housed in tents and unfortified buildings.
It is this nightmare world of no moral or ethical clarity; a world for which neither Bush nor any of his senior officials nor any general or senior military officer held themselves, or were held, responsible for creating, that this book so brilliantly conveys.
And in that world the photographs – of the naked human pyramid of Iraqi men composed for his camera by Corporal Charles Graner; the naked Iraqi being led on a leash by Graner’s lover, Lynndie England; the peak-hooded Iraqi standing on a box wearing a poncho, hooked up to wires, his arms outstretched as if he is being crucified – are given context and complex meaning.
The power of the writing affirms the limits of images and photographs as a means of truth-telling.
And the stories, mostly mundane and banal but nevertheless horrifying, of the abusers and the onlookers and the arse-coverers, become illustrations of what the great Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.
What the perpetrators of the abuse at Abu Ghraib lacked above all else was moral clarity, a sense of what is right and what is wrong. Their superiors, none of whom were charged with any offences – unlike Graner and England and a half-dozen other abusers who were charged and convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 10 years to six months – their culpability was far from banal.
Arendt was only partly right: not all evil is banal. In the end, the book convincingly shows the photographs were mostly staged and therefore the reality of what was being photographed was not as brutal as the pictures suggested.
It’s what the photographs do not show, what was not photographed – the beating to death of a prisoner interrogated by CIA agents; the regular beatings of prisoners by the military police guards; the sexual humiliation of prisoners, most of them innocent of any crime; the shackling of prisoners for hours on end in stress positions – that is what this book makes so hauntingly real.
The irony is that without the photographs, this book – in which there are no photographs – would never have been written.