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9 august 2008
Standard Operating Procedure is an unusual book. It is not really a print version of Errol Morris's film of the same name. Though Morris is listed as co-author, the book was written entirely by Philip Gourevitch. It constitutes a parallel work based on the same raw material: Morris's hundreds of hours of interviews with the principals in the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal. I haven't seen the film, which offers the visual and aural components of the material. Gourevitch's book is completely verbal. Gourevitch and Morris deliberately separated out the words from the pictures; Standard Operating Procedure, the book, is unillustrated.
The photographs, which have so dominated and, at times, distorted perceptions of the Abu Ghraib story, are widely available in print and online; and in attempting here to see the story afresh it became clear that much of what matters most about Abu Ghraib was never photographed. (283)
Gourevitch explores several troubling implications of Abu Ghraib and the intermittently contrite self-justifications of the punished offenders. One is that the taking of the photographs in a sense was the only crime. Getting caught was the crime itself, in one sense, but in another, documenting that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were committed with carefree insouciance was both crime and tragedy. That soldiers would think nothing of exposing themselves as prison abusers was part of the genuine turpitude of the situation. Have we, at long last, no shame?
Larger and even more unsettling was the widespread assumption, spun by the White House and the Defense Department, that the Abu Ghraib photos represented an aberration. Time and again, Bush administration rhetoric emphasized how Americans don't do evil things. When the photos emerged, the administration treated them from the start as sort of the exception that proved the rule. Here are a few bad apples, and after we throw them out of the barrel, we will reassume the high ground because we're Americans. The very presence of the photos, in their shock value, as Gourevitch notes above, limited the crime to the photos themselves. It's as if a single moment of horror conveniently precluded the necessity to investigate further.
Obviously, the tone at Abu Ghraib was set by George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, and permeated many reaches of the upper military command and the ominous dark network of contractors and OGAs (Other Government Agencies) that ran the covert war on terror in 2003-04, and indeed still do in venues never photographed. The leaders skated away from responsibility, and indeed Bush and Cheney won re-election not long after the scandal broke.
The worst implication is that America has never come to terms with Abu Ghraib. And in a still real and active sense, the majority of Americans probably do not want to come to terms with it, or have come to terms with it in ways that excuse or justify the abuses.
The continual undercurrent of the Morris interviews is that practices like the abuse, humiliation, and torture undertaken at Abu Ghraib were seen by most of the American soldiers there as quite justified by the circumstances of the Iraq War, indeed perhaps more generally by war itself. Aside from the occasional professional like Tim Dugan, a civilian interrogator who delivers a scathing critique of intelligence operations in Iraq, the interviewees all believed that the people they were "softening" by means of torture deserved what they got. (And yes, let's not mince words here: torture was widespread at Abu Ghraib, even if the President's lawyers might never concede the phrasing.) Abu Ghraib was being shelled nightly; Americans on duty there were being injured and some were killed. Baghdad was in chaos. The prison guards at Abu Ghraib believed that intelligence extorted from the prisoners was hugely beneficial to the American war effort. Or at least, even when faced with proof that the innocent were being tortured, the general idea was that the entire Iraq invasion, maybe especially its inhumane excesses, was justified payback for 9/11/01. The horrors of Abu Ghraib were far less, in these soldiers' minds, than the horrors of 9/11, and to object to the abuse on humanitarian grounds would be naïve, the reaction of a soft-hearted liberal who has never been in a combat zone.
That pervasive attitude, I think, extends pervasively stateside, and will have an enormous impact on the 2008 Presidential election, as it did in 2004. Standard Operating Procedure tends to show that many Americans have no real human concept of Muslims, Arabs, Persians, or many others branded as "evil" by the Bush government. (Still less do many Americans have the patience to tell the various peoples and faiths of the Middle East apart.) Many Americans believe along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales that the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" in their emphasis on human rights. Way too many of us have no problem with the flouting of basic human rights that characterizes Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other "extraordinary rendition" sites, including the recently-exposed prison ships that float around the world, avoiding sovereign authority. It takes terror to fight terror, we've decided. Oddly enough, it did not take terror to fight Hitler or Tojo. But after decades of perceived American weakness, in Korea, Vietnam, Iran, and now Iraq itself, Americans seem to have lost patience with the high road. Nobody seems to respect us, and we see very little reason to respect them. Hence the scorn lavished on Barack Obama for suggesting that he would meet with enemy leaders. And hence John McCain, long a respectable principled opponent of torture, waltzed to the Republican nomination after an astonishing about-face on the issue, in which he voted to allow the CIA to continue to torture detainees. (My language is unequivocal, but till February of 2008, so was John McCain's, and it was one of the few admirable things about him. Faced with a contest for President in which he was challenged strongly from the right, McCain broke with morality – and was embraced by his party for having done so.)
Standard Operating Procedure has no heroes. Some of its characters did things that were less bad than others: they set lines they would not cross, reported activities they knew were wrong. The convicted criminals were scapegoated, certainly, but they were just as certainly terribly guilty. And far too many people still have no problem with what they did. The outlook is desperate, and there is little hope that anything short of a huge national stock-taking on the issue, with a complete opening of the books on the "war against terror" – internal Nuremberg of sorts – could redeem the nation. But not even President Obama would have the political nerve to undertake that. And I suspect more and more that Americans will opt for President McCain, and further torture, instead.
Gourevitch, Philip, and Errol Morris. Standard Operating Procedure. New York: Penguin, 2008.
UPDATE 16 November 2008: Well, that election prediction sure turned out wrong, didn't it? But my concern remains: President Obama should read this book for a sense of how deeply torture continues to corrupt American foreign policy, and move decisively to reject his predecessor's policies.