Opening thoughts and questions
A hundred years ago in Boston, the Congo Reform Association published a pamphlet by Mark Twain called "King Leopold's Soliloquy, A Defense of His Congo Rule." The text takes the form of a monologue by the Belgian monarch, as he reads through a stack of protest literature, describing crimes perpetrated by his colonial agents against his Congolese subjects: torture, abduction, enslavement, starvation, mutilation, extermination. "Blister the meddlesome missionaries!" the king fulminates. "They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witnessing the happenings; and everything they see they commit to paper." But, even as he rails, Leopold comforts himself with the boast that he has never come across a critic (however truthful) whom he could not discredit, stifle, or convert by the application of force or cash. Then he comes upon a pamphlet that contains photographs of mutilated Congolese, and he quakes before the evidence of this "most powerful enemy" - "the incorruptible Kodak":
The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe... the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little Kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!
But even as he frets about the dangers of photography, and sees himself exposed in the grisly images of his mutilated subjects, the old Belgian discovers the true consolation of the political criminal. After all, he tells himself, the world's response to the pictures will surely be to shudder and turn away. With that thought he bucks himself up, defiant as ever. "Why certainly," he says. "That is my protection... I know the human race."
Shuddering and turning away. We did it again at Abu Ghraib.
I was covering President Bush's re-election campaign when the pictures of American soldiers tormenting their Iraqi wards in Saddam's old torture dungeons first broke in the press four years ago. The most shocking thing about the story was not that young Americans were doing such things (all of history teaches us that soldiers can easily be made to do such things, when given the license). Nor was it especially surprising to discover - as reams of official memoranda, legal opinions and military directives were leaked in the weeks and months that followed from the highest and most secretive reaches of the Bush war cabinet, the intelligence apparatus and the military command - that the outrages we saw in the Abu Ghraib pictures were expressions of a new American policy in favor of the torture and humiliation of American captives in war time. After all, the President and his men had long made clear that they regarded the Iraq War as part of the Global War on Terror, and that pretty much anything was allowed in the name of the GWOT.
No, the real shock in the Abu Ghraib story when it broke in 2004, was that there was no political price for it, no accountability for it, no public debate about whether these photographs were the way that we Americans wanted to be projecting our image and our force into the world at the start of the twenty-first century. The pictures themselves had instantly become iconic, the most witnessed images on earth since the collapse of the World Trade Towers, and it was obvious that their infamy belonged to the entire nation - and not just to the hapless soldiers who were court-martialed and sent to the brig for taking and appearing in them. I mean, nobody was carrying those pictures in protest through the streets of Baghdad, or Jakarta, or Tehran, to demonstrate against Charles Graner or Lynndie England or Sabrina Harman or Meghan Ambuhl or Jeremy Sivits or Javal Davis or Ivan "Chip Frederick, the seven "bad apples" whom the Administation's master framers wanted us to believe were solely responsible for the nation's dishonor.
So that dishonor was compounded by our acquiescence in it. The expose had become the cover up.
So Abu Ghraib was gnawing at me when, about a year and a half ago, the filmmaker Errol Morris, whom I've known for a long time -began sending me the transcripts of interviews he'd been filming with American service men and women who served at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003 when the notorious photographs were taken. The interviews spoke to me at once, and when Errol suggested that I could use them to write a book, I sat right down to it. These voices carried the full complexity of the story that I wanted to know: what it was like to be an American soldier serving in Saddam's old dungeons, holding Iraqis prisoner in the name of liberating them, serving the new American policy of total license in manhandling our captives without actually fully knowing that this policy had been put in place from on high.
From the outset I conceived of Standard Operating Procedure as a war story. I did not want S.O.P. to be a policy book, so much as a book that tells what policy looked like when it intersected with reality in the hellish theatre of the war that was Abu Ghraib.
Much of what was most wrong and most cruel about Abu Ghraib never appeared in the infamous photographs. The prison was situated in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, in the midst of a combat zone, an illegal arrangement under US Army doctrine, and a distastrous one. The prison was under constant attack: soldiers and prisoners were killed and wounded by incoming mortars. Most of the prisoners there were held without charges, having been picked up on security sweeps by US patrols, and as their numbers leapt from a few hundred to a few thousand to nearly ten thousand through the fall of 2003, there was no system for releasing them. So, you had indefinite detention, without recourse to any system of law, in life-threatening conditions. Reasonably enough, the prisoners sometimes demonstrated, demanding better treatment - and when they did it was not uncommon for US soldiers to "control" them by firing on them with live ammunition. Children as young as ten years old were held at the prison, often as hostages - taken as bait to coax their wanted fathers or uncles or brothers to turn themselves in. This to was a war crime. And the list of these crimes goes on.
So the book, which sticks to the claustrophobic confines of Abu Ghraib's prison walls, is really very broad in its concerns, and the remarkable group of discussants that TPM has convened for this week's book club is every bit as broad in its experience and insight. For this reason, I'm really far more interested in responding to their questions, than in framing the discussion with questions of my own. But I know that's my burden here, in this kick-off post... so here are a few thoughts followed by question marks for you to chew over or ignore in favor of your better ones:
One thread of questions goes like this: What good is this story? Seriously - what do we do with the knowledge of these war crimes? What would accountability really mean? Assuming, as I'm afraid I do, that we won't be seeing any high political officials standing trial - what moral or political use is there in examining such stories?
Another thread of questions touches on our military culture. During Vietnam, the anti-war movement was the anti-draft movement. Now, almost everyone agrees - hawks and doves alike - that if we had a draft we would never have had the Iraq war, and perhaps for that reason we will never have a draft again. Instead, now, military service belongs to certain classes and regions in this country - to a large degree to certain families, as if we have moved to a caste-system, and there is now a military caste. The MPs who are at the core of Standard Operating Procedure come from Jim Webb's patch of Appalachia - and they were widely dismissed as rogue hillbilly degenerates by a political and journalistic caste that frankly assumed superiority. Should we all be lobbying to bring back the draft to restore democracy to this country before we go trying to impose around the world?
And finally - since we are in a political election year - how readily and how easily do you think we will repair the damage done by the policies that created Abu Ghraib, if indeed there is any public desire to do so?
I'm looking forward to hearing from you -- TPM readers as well as Book Club discussants -- and to engaging in the week's discussion. Thanks for reading Standard Operating Procedure, and thanks for having me with you.
Any commanding officer who allows video or photographic equipment within a torture or interrogation venue should be court martialed.
There must be accountability!
June 23, 2008 11:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ha! You got that right: the way it played out, photography became the crime -- the act of taking the pictures more than the acts depicted. And as soon as the Army's investigation into the pictures began in January 2004, Colonel Thomas Pappas of Military Intelligence, who was the base commander at Abu Ghraib, issued an amnesty order -- inviting all the soldiers at the prison to turn in their contraband: porn, personal weapons, pets, booze -- all the things outlawed in Iraq by the Army's "General Order Number One." And to this stock list he added photographs of prisoners. Nobody had ever seen such an amnesty order before, but everybody understood. There was a massive wiping of hard drives and memory sticks throughout the prison that night. So evidence was destroyed, and witnesses were silenced, and the frame of the investigation tightened even before it had properly begun to focus on those who had taken pictures or appeared in them.
June 23, 2008 12:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is a crime to photograph prisoners of war for anything other than I.D.
June 24, 2008 1:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yup -- that was the basis for Pappas's inclusion of contraband photographs in the amnesty, the Geneva Convention prohibition on photographing prisoners. But by then hundreds of photographs had been taken, week after week, of the prisoners on the Military Intelligence block, and those photographs had been shown by the MPs who took them to their higher ups, to medics, to JAGs (Army lawyers), etc. One of the photographs of the naked human pyramid of prisones that later dismayed the world was being used as a screensaver on the computer in the MPs office on the night shift on the MI cellblock. If not everyone, a whole lot of people in authority had seen these pictures without objecting to them. What was a crime and what wasn't a crime was deliberately extremely blurry at Abu Ghraib. Soldiers aware that they should refuse an illegal order had no way to be sure what was legal, given the proliferation of orders undermining longstanding military doctrine and law. AND this legal murkiness applied also to the status of the prisoners. You say that photographing POWs is illegal except for I.D. But the US occupation authorities denied that any of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were POWs. After al Bush had declared major combat over -- and that's what he meant: the enemy was now all "illegal combatants." So military prisoners were reclassified as "security detainees" -- a status based on a loophole in the Geneva Conventions, which was used throughout the war on terror to deny Geneva protections to those we captured. So, you're right, but...
June 24, 2008 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Any commanding officer who allows behavior that could not be photographed and reported has failed and has probably committed a war crime.
The problem is not the photos. It's the behavior. In the case of the commanding officer it is the loss of control of his troops. His responsibility is to always have control of his troops, to be aware of what they are doing and the justification for that, and to be personally responsible for everything they do or fail to do.
June 23, 2008 11:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm watching a live congressional hearing on C-SPAN right now whose Chair is Bart Stupak, a Democrat from Michigan. The hearing concerns the effect of the Commodities Futures Market has on today's price of oil.
Stupak and the Democrats on the Committee, John Dingell for one, are up in arms over the speculation that is driving prices up, but it was a Republican on the Committee who brought up the fact that Pelosi, Stupak and Dingell all voted for the Commodities Futures Modernization Bill pushed by Texas Senator Repub Phill Gram and his wife Wendy who was on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and worked throught the changes her husband and ENRON wanted.
So what I'm seeing here is an analogy of your "incorruptible KODAK". Politicians who are up in arms over oil prices they themselves had a hand in allowing to get so high.
As to Standard Operating Procedure,, we will never recover from the 8 years of the Bush gang's activity, nor will we ever live down Abu Ghraib, et al.....unless...the next President uses his office to go after ALL of the cretins responsible for the lawlessness and tragedy of last 8 years.
June 23, 2008 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hear! Hear!
June 23, 2008 5:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed. We have not lived down My Lai, either. Covered up by Colin Powell, another politician General promoted for his ability to cover up crimes instead of reveal them and make those directly responsible pay for what they did.
June 23, 2008 11:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
One thread of questions goes like this: What good is this story? Seriously - what do we do with the knowledge of these war crimes? What would accountability really mean? Assuming, as I'm afraid I do, that we won't be seeing any high political officials standing trial - what moral or political use is there in examining such stories?
I'm more sanguine about this. I suspect that as the Bush administration recedes into history, as the desperate, face-saving memoirs and apologies continue come out, as their few remaining friends disappear or head for high land, and as they lose the last remaining shreds of their terrestrial power and ability to intimidate reporters and investigators, they will finally be forced to pay a price. I don't expect that Bush will ever be held truly accountable in the United States. But I suspect that by 2018 or 2023 there will be a long list of Bush administration officials, including Bush himself, who will not be able to travel abroad because they are being sought almost everywhere for a long list of national and international crimes.
June 23, 2008 12:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
What good is this story? Seriously - what do we do with the knowledge of these war crimes?
We need to seriously beef up training at the military academies and the CIA teaching why this is illegal and more-so un-American. We need to clean out the thousands of bad apples in the military the Republican War in Iraq has left us. Thousands of young officers and NCOs with consciences have not re-upped. The politicization of the DoJ is small potatoes in comparison.
British brutality and General Washington's refusal to retaliate in kind along with the patriotic media's trumpeting of both is what turned public opinion around in the dark days after our soldiers were chased out of NYC and down to Valley Forge.
There are a lot of good people in the US military along with the bad. But anybody who doesn't understand that basic lesson in American history and why it still applies today and always will has no business wearing one of our uniforms.
June 23, 2008 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
True, but more than anything else, awareness of these issues needs to take root in popular culture through books like this. And we must weed out enablers in the MSM.
The military is a vertical hierarchy by necessity. Change the leadership and the rank and file will toe the line, as they must. The Powell Doctrine persevered through zero wars when put to the test.
June 23, 2008 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
In defense of the U.S. army, they know full well that this is criminal behavior, that this is a violation of the Geneva convention and that those soldiers participating in it must be courts martialed. That the punishment fell disproportionately on the enlisted soldiers is a matter of course.
June 24, 2008 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
After seeing Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure it seems like the orders for such malfeasance started at the top. I know the film was a reinactment of the crimes but it was extraordinarily hellish. These individuals on both sides of torture will have nightmares for a long time.
It was so disturbing on so many levels.
June 23, 2008 3:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
I've been thinking a lot about the development of the military caste you mention and how that affected both the behavior of the soldiers and the reception of the images. This caste's status is reinforced by the constant cant of "support the troops," as well as by the idea that military service is superior to any other kind of service to society; in fact, military service and service have become synonymous -- just listen to John McCain when he says that his opponent "has never served." There is a cluster of rhetorical terms and strategies designed to underwrite the privileges of the emerging Spartan class.
June 23, 2008 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah. A lot of that gets creepy. I certainly "support the troops" and want to avoid the mutual antagonism of the 60s. But there are some jingoistic nuts too.
The root of the problem is really our FP over many decades. That's why I like Obama's call to both change military FP to be more widely supported, increase real support for the troops by reducing tours and increasing benefits, and to promote civil service tied to college scholarships, like a civilian GI Bill.
**
It should also be an important part of soldiering to do humanitarian work and be capable of policing duties if they're expected to handle situations like Iraq. There's certainly a lot work to be done on levees and delivering food aid and such.
Just as it's important Police not only see the worst of humanity, one night shift after another. I've long said that both cops and soldiers ought to be paid more with better benefits and more vacation, treated better, and a small but significant fraction of PAID time go towards community outreach. BBQ's in the park, PAL and such. I used to fish on PAL boats as a kid, and it was good for me, good for cops, and healthy for the community.
June 23, 2008 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right. Exactly. That's absolutly the key to understanding this mess, and it reflects directly on the leadership, civilian and military. The reason for this travesty is obvious, as is the solution. If the public generally knew these few simple facts.
That point, in conjunction with Mark Twain's observation the public doesn't want to look for long into the abyss, makes for a near perfect cover up.
Utterly bury the hard facts which are fairly straightforward and damning of leadership, while making a grotesque carnival of the images and the soldiers invoved, until the public can't look any longer. With the MSM exploiting the carnival aspects and ingratiating itself to power, as usual.
It's also critical to understanding what's so sick and twisted, perhaps deliberately nihilistic, about our tabloid MSM. The MSM is a bit like the rotten meat fed to starving Abu Ghraib detainees.
June 23, 2008 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
While I do have sympathy for the overstressed, propagandized, media-saturated people of this country, ultimately it's no excuse; history will have to create a category similar to 'the good German' to explain the typical American's apathy and denial of these war crimes committed in our name.
June 23, 2008 4:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Totally apart from the accountability issue--
I think if the next president is smart, he'll apologize to the world for Abu Ghraib in his inaugural address. I think most Americans would like to see that, even many of the most hawkish ones.
I'd actually prefer the new president apologize to the world for invading Iraq without international consensus, but being realistic, I know that's not in the realm of possibilities.
June 23, 2008 6:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
As long as we're dreaming, how about MSM talking head apologizing for not reporting on a WAR that our country is fighting day by day, night by night, death by death.
The HUFFPO headline said 2 minutes a week was devoted to the war in Iraq; I think that is overstated. Of course, it is NOT really a war; it is an illegal occupation. Not really a reason for the MSM to ignore the subject, but a reason for them to get pressured to do so.
More than an apology is due.
June 23, 2008 7:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Phil,
It seems the Bush Maladministration won the public debate over Abu Ghraib. While Americans were truly appalled by the scandal, the Bush-holes still managed both to win the PR battle --blaming Gen. Karpinski and said Bad Apples-- and partner with the Republican-controlled Congress to dodge serious investigation.
Their number-one objective was political: ensure a second Bush term and GOP majority in order to continue their neocon delusions in Iraq.
They succeeded.
It became clear after his 2004 re-election that Bush, indeed, got past the only "accountability moment" that matters, and that no honest investigation would ever occur until those responsible were long gone. Ever since, Americans have been free to rationalize, if Abu Ghraib was really so bad, Bush never would have won re-election... Let's move on.
Short of shocking new revelations --like evidence that Wolfowitz wanked to live, nude prisoner pyramids via Predator webcam-- Americans won't get worked-up about Abu Ghraib anymore.
Which raises a couple of questions:
1. I read news contemporaneous accounts that members of Congress were privately shown Abu Ghraib photos far more graphic and disturbing than any ever released to the public. Do such photos exist, and do you believe it is in the public interest that they be released?
2. Should foreign policy realists --especially Democratic opinion leaders-- work to ensure that Abu Ghraib is properly understood as the inevitable consequence of the defective neocon/Republican Party world view?
P.S. I attended Amos Kanterovich's debut, baked bread with Phiwy Wicky, dated Kai, and hung out with a psychic from CT. ;-)
June 23, 2008 7:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: your P.S. -- wow, that's old times you're talking about. I know you. Nice to hear Amos remembered.
June 23, 2008 8:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
The President said that the day the Abu Ghraib pictures came out was the worst day of the war. He made it sound like a candid statement -- an honest reckoning. But it wasn't true. The photographs were a great boon to the President and his team: they created a huge distraction. Instead of riveting public attention on how torture and abuse were officially sanctioned -- how the most honorable legacy of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had been systematically trashed -- the photographs allowed the trashers of that great American legacy to go around declaring like Claude Raines at Sam's Place in Casablanca that they were shocked, shocked and disgusted, and everybody got obsessed with the apparent kinkiness of the bad apples while the Administration pursued its torture policy with unabated fervor.
So, yes, when they came out of the sealed room in Congress where they viewed the photographs, they said there was worse to come -- Rumsfeld particulary liked this line -- but no such pictures have ever emerged. I've seen hundreds and hundreds of the pictures, and there's no evidence at all that the "far more graphic and disturbing" images ever existed. But, as you suggest, the insinuation made us think -- well, I guess that really wasn't so bad. And you know what? The Abu Ghraib photographs, for the most part, do not show the worst of what was going on: water boarding was worse, beatings were worse, murder was worse -- being held in tents beneath incoming mortars was worse. Of course, if there were photographs of all these things, it would be in the public interest for them to be released. The photographs we do know performed an immense public service, and had they been taken by photojournalists there would have been prizes for the scoop. Instead the photographers were sent to do time in the brig.
As for your second question: I don't know about realists vs. neocons, but yes, torture should be a campaign issue, and if it's not the nation will be done a terrible disservice and Democratic voters will have every reason to ask what it really means that they are voting for "change." If Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security then they must address torture -- because becoming a nation that allows torture makes us terrifyingly insecure in every sense of the term. Let the supporters of torture defend it openly and unambiguously in the face of the fact that no useful intelligence came from it at Abu Ghraib, and that what information allegedly came from it elsewhere is so discredited that dangerous terrorists may have to be released because torture now has made it impossible to prosecute them.
June 23, 2008 8:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Instead the photographers were sent to do time in the brig.
And properly so!
Where was the photographer's journalistic perspective? Where the ironic distancing?
Candidness is a crime against decent sensibilities -- and aesthetics.
June 23, 2008 9:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
SOP is an important addition to our understanding of how we ended up in Abu Ghraib and beyond, but I feel a need to point out something that was inexplicably left out of both the film and the book--any Iraqi voices, especially those who were depicted in the infamous photographs. In a project that declared as its primary focus to understand those in the photographs, I was disappointed to be offered only the MPs versions of those nights.
I met with several of the Iraqis depicted in the photographs last year, including the one the MPs nicknamed "Gus," the man on the end of Lynndie England's leash, who I will refer to here as "Amir." In the MPs version of that night, as reported in SOP, Graner is concerned with the well-being of Amir, of how to move him without injuring him, which led to using the "tie-down strap." As I read this I assumed that Mr Gourevitch was merely allowing the MPs enough rope to hang themselves, as it were, but Gourevitch concludes with this:“Once we learn Shitboy’s story, however, the pictures of him with Graner and Frederick become relatively anodyne. With Gus and the tie-down strap, the opposite is true: even when we find out the story, the pictures of him with England remain shocking—only now the shock lies in the fact that the pictures look worse, more deliberately deviant and abusive, than the reality they depict.” (p148)
I understand the desire to make clear that seven low-level MPs took the fall for a policy that was formed in the White House, and accepted by and large by the American people, but I don't see what it serves to suggest that the photographs "look worse . . . than the reality they depict."
If you would like to read Amir's version of the events of that night, The Physicians for Human Rights have just released a report called "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," and Amir's transcript can be found at http://brokenlives.info/. His description of that night is anything but anodyne.
June 23, 2008 9:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems the Bush Maladministration won the public debate over Abu Ghraib. While Americans were truly appalled by the scandal, the Bush-holes still managed both to win the PR battle --blaming Gen. Karpinski and said Bad Apples-- and partner with the Republican-controlled Congress to dodge serious investigation.
You only have to look at public opinion polls about the war to know that's not true. The American people have cast their opinion against this occupation in cement now for years. No matter how much Republicans bleat "the surge is working!" a huge majority steadfastly want us out of Iraq. Abu Ghraib is a big part of that.
The same goes for Iraqis.
June 24, 2008 10:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
The neocon crowd cared about public opinion only to the extent it was an asset or obstacle to amassing political power. They don't believe in quaint concepts like right and wrong which inhabit the reality-based community.
They "won" the public debate on the only terms which matter: retaining control of political power in Washington DC.
The American public casting its opinion against the occupation after the 2004 election was too late. Abu Ghraib --concealed, distorted and spun by the necons-- ultimately did not prevent Bush from securing a second term.
The result: a minimum four-year lid on the truth --guaranteeing that no senior administration perps would be prosecuted, the scandal would fade from public consciousness, and the shredders could shred away.
The Bush-holes were free not only to continue the Iraq occupation, but expand & deepen it irreversibly, committing subsequent administrations to a significant US military presence.
Sure, Americans now oppose the occupation, but the neocons already got their way.
June 25, 2008 12:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
What good is this story? Seriously - what do we do with the knowledge of these war crimes?
As a foreign (Australian) observer, it seems to me that Abu Ghraib - and indeed the entire Iraq War, and the whole bogus GWOT, and the insanely criminal Bush administration, and the US public's inability or lack of inclination to do much of anything about any of them - is symptomatic of a much broader social illness which the USA suffers today.
Even if those responsible never face justice, the story of all these horrors should be repeated over and over and over again, until everyone in the USA understands just what happened and why it was so wrong. Then you need to start dismantling your whole over-sized military industry, and giving your kids a better education, and cutting back on all the Hollywood violence these same kids are exposed to.
Germany and Japan today are peaceful, educated nations because their citizens learned from the mistakes of WWII (OK, the Japanese are still working a few issues out). They are also prosperous without relying on a war machine to generate jobs and profits. Take heed.
June 25, 2008 12:55 AM | Reply | Permalink