Corrected on most counts
Nick Flynn, my friend. I didn't speak to Gus, of course, and I yield to your inside scoop and superior (this isn't sarcastic) knowledge of things political. No dookey. I'm not a big political thinker and don't pretend to be. I am introspective dweeb who wanders around her apartment reading new translations of Virgil. But I am a citizen, and I do give a big rat's ass about understanding how soldiers become solely responsible for the crimes of policy makers. And how in the future do we stop another Abu Ghraib from happening? Somehow I don't think spanking those already spanked seems useful.
Standard Operating Procedure gave me a chance to consider the humanity of people who've been whole depersonalized, people from a class not much represented by the media roasting them, while their superiors--the real perpetrators of serious war crime policies--skate walk into their big-fee speaking engagements. (I wonder what Rumsfeld gets?)
Vis a vis Gourevitch, I don't think he was writing the book you propose--a comprehensive history. He's not a historian, and I don't think he'd be good at it. Since you've talked to Gus, maybe the Iraqi view belongs in a book you can write. (Again, this is not sarcastic--this format--predicated on snipes--always sounds snarky, and I'm holding your paw and looking into your blue eyes as I suggest it would be a great book, and maybe you'd be the dude for it.) Standard Operating Procedure represented one point of view--the soldiers. That was its job. Other books on the tragedy can perform other functions, but before that book, I never heard their side of the story.
Of course. What troubles me is the inability to speak in humane terms about anybody in the military without their being summarily reroasted. And it seems to give people some kind of rush that frightens me--the venom of it. The attitude of attack is not unlike what I think those prisoners at Abu Ghraib faced, and I don't understand how--in the name of some dreamed of peace and a civilization where prisoners aren't humiliated and armies maybe cease to be necessary--I fail to see how the tone helps. And I'm not talking about your considered note, but the tone of the whole conversation seems to me violent in the cause of some conversation that neither smart enough nor pious enough to participate in.
i agree with you, mary.
thing of it is, these same "progressives", who claim to champion civil and human rights considerations, are quick to deny lower middle class, and working poor citizens (the classes where the majority of soldiers and guards men and women come from) their rights. they've demonized and demeaned the less fortunate as some lesser order, casting them as "rednecks" and other similar terms.
it's getting to the point that you can't tell the difference between them and neocons.
June 24, 2008 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oh bull. You would base that on? What?
It was the most "progressive" members of congress and the military that called for more troops and pointed out sending insufficient numbers would leave them overwhelmed and make their mission all the more difficult. They also called for better body armor and armored vehicles.
It was the Bush admin, the neocons, and lock step Republican backing which created this fiasco.
It was the more progressive members of congress and particularly Democrats and the so-called "liberal media" which broke the scandals at Walter Reed.
It was the Bush admin, the neocons, and lock step Republican backing which attempted to cover it up.
Jim Webb, a Democrat, with the backing of a large number of Democratic Progressives, is calling for greatly improving the benefits provided to those serving or considering service in the armed forces.
It's the Bush admin, the neocons, and lock step Republican backing attempting to block or poison Webb's benefits package.
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wws is always trolling veteran issues. He's either a Freeper and not a vet, or one of the most self defeating and misinformed vets on earth.
June 25, 2008 12:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course. What troubles me is the inability to speak in humane terms about anybody in the military without their being summarily reroasted. And it seems to give people some kind of rush that frightens me--the venom of it. The attitude of attack is not unlike what I think those prisoners at Abu Ghraib faced, and I don't understand how--in the name of some dreamed of peace and a civilization where prisoners aren't humiliated and armies maybe cease to be necessary--I fail to see how the tone helps. And I'm not talking about your considered note, but the tone of the whole conversation seems to me violent in the cause of some conversation that neither smart enough nor pious enough to participate in.
Which whole conversation are you talking about? I'm personally missing the context. You seem to be referring to some sort of sub-culture in which conversations about people in the military are typically laced with violence and venom, and are lacking in any expression of humane concern for soldiers.
Where is this sub-culture located, and where do they hold their conversations? I'd like to join in, if only for the change of pace. In the world of political discussion as I've experienced it, Abu Ghraib is an awkward topic that is rarely mentioned, and soldiers are typically characterized in terms ranging from decent respect to extravagant worship.
June 24, 2008 12:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Standard Operating Procedure gave me a chance to consider the humanity of people who've been whole depersonalized, people from a class not much represented by the media roasting them, while their superiors--the real perpetrators of serious war crime policies--skate walk into their big-fee speaking engagements. (I wonder what Rumsfeld gets?)
perhaps less incorrect than empathically misled.
yes, it's humane to consider class inequity or other imbalances in normative cultural contexts of justice dispensed; to apply or confine depersonalization to specific modalities of social interaction. however, "the military" is a culture within where hierarchies qua the military are normatively imbalanced and depersonalization a normative, often esteemed value if not virtue to war's ethos of kill or be killed.
yes, we overlook accountability from military superiors and elected leaders to our persistent peril & collective folly (vietnam, iraq I, iraq II, iran I et seq.)
but does class, rank or war always justify the indiscriminate, individual commission of inhumane acts? pace nuremberg, no. since?
hugh thompson represented "people from a class not much represented by the media." yet, thompson was ostracized and vilified for an act of humane intervention.
william calley was convicted of premeditated murder for ordering the execution of 22 civilians. calley sued for his release which was granted following 3 1/2 years of "house arrest."
the underlings at abu ghraib whatever their class -- like good germans, like the good soldiers in calley's platoon -- followed orders.
that those ultimately responsible for abu ghraib -- including an electorate who surrendered informed consent to wage an unnecessary war -- may escape accountability should hardly surprise.
June 24, 2008 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
dear mary,
thanks for yr response. and I'd like to say again that I'm grateful that this discussion is happening, and that yr part of it. I'd love to know what virgil would say about all this.
re: yr comment "vis a vis Gourevitch, I don't think he was writing the book you propose--a comprehensive history." as I understood it, the project of SOP was limited to those depicted in the infamous photographs ("narrow focus" is the term I've heard morris use), which is the only reason I was confused that no Iraqis voices were represented. I was in no way expecting a comprehensive history--we are all entitled to write whatever book we can--but to allow graner to claim that he was merely trying to help the man on the end of england's leash ("amir" aka as "gus"), and then to support that claim (". . . when we find out the story, the pictures of him (amir) 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.” (SOP p148), verges on being ludicrous.
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."
and as for me having an "inside scoop," Amir's version of the events of the night he was photographed on the end of Lynndie England's leash is readily accessible, The Physicians for Human Rights have just released a report called "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," and his transcript can be found at http://brokenlives.info/.
it is only because I respect the work of morris and gourevitch (as I imagine you do), and that their words and films carry such weight, that I am trying to fill in a few gaps. it was distressing to read you retelling graner's version of the events of that night, without the counter-balance of the man on the wrong end of the leash, who, before he was arrested, was just another working class guy trying to get by.
June 24, 2008 8:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll address the question of why the book is told through the eyes and voices of the Americans, not the Iraqis, in a forthcoming post, but for now let me just say I'm puzzled that you base your complaint about the absence of Iraqis on the prisoner nicknamed Gus -- since he is the prisoner who’s plight I feature most prominently. He has, in fact, the last word in the book.
Regarding the infamous photograph in which he appears naked and prone at the end of Lynndie England's leash-like strap -- that picture has been nearly universally viewed as an image of sadomasochistic abuse, a record of how a young American female dragged a naked Iraqi man across the floor like a dog. All of the MPs on the scene that night, however tell a different story – in which Graner used the strap to get Gus out of an isolation cell, where he had been placed naked and in total darkness by other soldiers on a previous shift (a fact recorded in writing at the time in the MPs logbook). Graner then handed the strap to England, who was there as his girlfriend -- she was an administrative clerk, with no authority to be there as a guard -- and he took her picture, snap snap snap: three pictures in three seconds.
Graner does not say, and I certainly do not say, that he was just trying to help Gus. Nor is there any suggestion at any time that the outrageous and brutal treatment of Gus was anodyne. To say so is simply to make ridiculous a description of a more complex reality. It's a reality that can be hard to get one's mind around. Yet there it is: the Army’s chief forensic investigator, Special Agent Brent Pack, who was in charge of examining the photos – the man whose testimony in court martials was instrumental in putting most of the “bad apples” in jail – said that it’s clear from the slack in the strap that England was not dragging Gus in the photos. The head medic at Abu Ghraib at the time made a similar claim to researchers from the New England Journal of Medicine. And the consistency of these accounts, not only from MPs who had reason to make excuses, struck me as interesting: that in a place where violent abuse was routine and sanctioned, the photograph we think of as a photograph of torture was apparently not a moment of torture. You say you know better from Gus, but I was not saying that Gus was being decently treated – only that the photographs can be a deficient form of information.
As for Gus's humanity -- his story becomes quite moving even as it gets grimmer and grimmer through the fall of 2003 at the prison, which is why I give it privilige of place as the final note in the book. Gus refused to eat, and grew frailer and frailer even as the MPs force-fed him intravenously. When they learned he was not a terrorist or insurgent, as they'd been told, but a guy who'd been arrested after a drunken fight in a bar, some of the MPs -- whom there's no reason to disbelieve -- tried to get him released. But that was impossible in the prison, where there was no mechanism to liberate the wrongly imprisoned (another war crime, there). Gus kept up his hunger strike, and even refused clothing at times, and his refusal struck me as a form of resistance, existential and self-annihilating perhaps, but courageous too -- an attempt to deny his captors the ability to hold him captive. They had his body, but they couldn't get his soul, and even his body he took back from them with his refusal of food. So Gus, as the MPs described him, struck me as a figure like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, literature's first true figure of absolute dissent, who consigns himself to oblivion in order to assert his existence in the face of annihilation. Others may see him as deranged, but I present him as something much more disturbing. He kept saying, "I refuse" – and it is for this reason that I describe him as “the closest thing to a free man in Abu Ghraib.” I didn't hear of anybody else at the prison saying that.
June 25, 2008 2:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
please share. what is the larger, essential truth of SOP if there were no participants who defied "procedures" which only later "disturbed" when perpetrators recognized a need to "cya?"
morris/gourevitch: but photos lie.
response: so what?
acknowledging the risks & repercussions of insubordination, who are the hugh thompsons in SOP and why, if absent, should i care about "good soldiers" following orders unwilling to risk disobedience in the moment but bravely dissenting after the fact?
i've yet to read SOP and may not bother if it's the overreach for "complex" revisionism nee "reality" -- viz. subalterns who could've change the real outcome of any photograph, but didn't -- gourevitch seems to convey.
June 25, 2008 4:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Roger Fenton in Abu Graib
In the end will Charles Graner come to be recognized as one of the great war photographers, his oeuvre studied, analyzed, discussed and disputed by generations to come?
June 25, 2008 10:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
It should be mentioned that was only one of many visits England paid to the detention area to participate in sadistic photo shoots to torture and humiliate prisoners.
This desire to exonerate England seems a shameless pander and perhaps an attempt to make her (and her femininity?) a symbol of our inner "sweet country girl" which is then corrupted and victimized. It seems to be riffing on the PC post feminist belief that women aren't inherently violent or sadistic.
Which makes for a good dramatization and oppurtunity to create a more sympathetic character in what would otherwise be an abysmal gaze into the human psyche. But it's pure fiction.
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England was not a "sweet country girl" but was a rather troubled young woman. She grew up in a trailer park, began wearing combat boots from her teenage years, was a mediocre student, worked a number of lousy jobs, and was then called to Iraq. In Iraq, of all people she choose Charles Graner as a boyfriend, a really violent psychopath, who fully looks the part. She even became pregnant and had his child.
England wasn't even supposed to be around prisoners as her duties were administrative. Yet, she came to meet Graner, often, to participate in sadistic photo shoots. The "leash girl" photo is only one of many, the least offensive in fact. In others she's clearly smiling and smirking. She was a willing accomplice.
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She's not guilty of as many or as severe crimes as Graner. Graner being an extremely violent and insane sadist. But their respective prison sentences, England 3 years, Graner 10 years, reflect that.
Neither should be exonerated with the defense of "following orders." Not from commanders, nor from "beaus."
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None of which in any way detracts from the accountability due to commanders for creating this situation whereby, inevitably, some deeply troubled soldiers would exploit the lack of supervision and situation to commit such acts. One could even infer commanders at high levels counted on it.
June 25, 2008 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought the leash photo's infamy was indeed because it did not show hard-core "torture" --as in beating/electric-shocking a prisoner to extract the location hostages, nuclear material, etc. The American public could understand and rationalize (while still finding repellent) the calculus of soldiers in a war zone perpetrating the latter.
The Iraqi on a leash and images like it appear entirely gratuitous: young Americans entertaining themselves by inflicting pain and humiliation upon helpless civilians while snapping trophy photos.
Contrary to Mary Karr's psychobabble, the soldiers elaborately staged and recorded photographs of Iraqis treated like slaves and animals because they thought it was a hoot.
Americans weren't necessarily appalled to see U.S. troops abusing & inflicting pain on Iraqi prisoners in a war zone, they were appalled to see US troops enjoying themselves while abusing & inflicting pain on Iraqi prisoners in a war zone --for no reason other than shits-and-giggles.
These weren't "professionals" soberly performing an unpleasant but necessary duty to find WMDs and liberate oppressed Iraqis; they were goons arranging male prisoners into simulated sex acts, sadists desecrating and laughing at corpses with erections.
We can debate the criminality of individual acts as well as the forces, conditions and leadership failures that encouraged/enabled young Americans soldiers to behave so utterly contrary to our most sacred values (and the stated mission). But the potency of images like the leash photos --representative or not-- was that they portrayed Americans as sociopaths.
June 25, 2008 10:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's exactly what bugs me. From celebrity rehab to war crimes, it's the same schtick from the same sort of people with much the same appraoch.
"concerned" only enough to form salacious dramatizations, emotional truths, and gut checks. Which then become bumper sticker slogans and knee-jerk identity politics.
It's intellectual junk food and mental obesity.
Philip Gourevitch focused on the decisions and circumstances which led to soldier's experiences. It draws a fairly clear picture of causation and outcomes using common sense. Solutions, such as not locating prisons in combat zones, nor under staffing them, nor disrupting the chain of command, nor conflicted guidelines on rules and torture; they seem fairly obvious with the bare facts presented.
Is it really that unreasonable to expect that as the norm?
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Mary Karr in her first post immediately blamed the "beau" for transforming a "sweet girl" into sadistic "leash girl." Along with a great deal of self exposition about her father and some other identity politics bolted on for good measure.
Just as lazily someone else could claim (and I've actually heard all of these):
She, as a woman in the military, created sexual friction which eroded morality, and it's all the feminist's fault.
The Christian Soldiers were corrupted by exposure to Muslim terrorists, and it's all the fault of tolerance and secularists.
They were closeted gays into S&M, but couldn't be asked or screened, and it's all the gay activists fault.
They were unhealthily repressing the homoerotic urges Keynes proved we all have, and it's all the homophobe's fault.
They were only using unorthodox torture methods because proper torture methods were restricted, and it's all the peaceniks's fault.
They were only doing what all soldiers do in all wars, and therefore we should have neither wars nor a military, and it's all the militarist's fault.
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George Carlin (RIP) also had a general theory for everything which is perhaps more appealing than most in elegant simplicity: too many stupid people.
June 24, 2008 10:48 PM | Reply | Permalink