Thank you, Philip, for another heartbreakingly brilliant book. I have already told several people that they MUST read it, and am planning to give it to a number of others. I'll get to some of your questions here and in later posts, and will ask some of my own. But I don't want to assume that TPMCafe readers have read or seen S.O.P., so I'll write a little about the book and movie first. Just a little ... because I've got little post-it flags and yellow highlighter notes through far too much of it to mention here. Read it for yourselves, please.

I am assuming that everyone here remembers the horrible photos: the caped and hooded man on the box; the pyramid of naked prisoners; the skinny female soldier holding the detainee on a leash. And I am assuming that most of us were shocked and profoundly ashamed, as I was, that this is now what America stands for: torture and occupation and humiliation, rather than truth and justice and morality and honor. (I'm not saying that the U.S. has always fulfilled the ideal, but I am ashamed we have so actively rejected it.) Or am I assuming too much? A friend recently told me that, after 9/11, he took for granted that something like Abu Ghraib would happen, given human nature, given all we know from the Stanford prison experiment and so much else. I was shocked by his cynicism. To realize that human beings were being tortured in my name, with my tax dollars, and that I had no idea how to make it stop, sickened me with shame.

Gourevitch and Morris offer a window into the hearts and minds of soldiers who were distorted by war and abandoned by their country, who were forced to do brutal and brutalizing things, and who were scapegoated when their acts were exposed. The movie asks: what was actually happening when those photos were taken? How did people feel about them? I saw Errol Morris's movie a couple of months ago, in an early screening at Brandeis, and was so heartbroken that I couldn't speak the rest of the night. It's one thing to know intellectually that the low-level MPs who were prosecuted were taking the fall for the administration; it's another to watch as a naif like Sabrina Harman talks about taking pictures to prove that they were told to do such things. To listen to Javal Davis, Lynndie England, and Sabrina Harman and grasp how intimately their inner lives were distorted -- and their public lives destroyed -- by what they were ordered and expected to do, and by what they had to witness, was heartbreaking.

I find Errol Morris's method to be profoundly affecting, emotionally wrenching -- and yet the movie left me with a lot of factual questions. Gourevitch's book took me much deeper into the facts and documents, and so was heartbreaking in a far deeper and more intellectual way. I wasn't sure, watching the movie, what had actually happened and what those interviewed were saying self-servingly; the book answered the smaller questions, such as the dates that Harman wrote her letters or how Javal Davis actually behaved. And to know that Lynndie England still hears the screams of someone whom military intelligence (or the CIA, or FBI, or civilian contractors) were torturing--seeing from that small angle is, as I have to say again, heartbreaking. Of course the big picture is horrible in its own way. But seeing how U.S. actions at Abu Ghraib shattered lives -- and not even the lives of the tortured or torturers, but the kind of rural working class folks who I went to grade school and high school in southern Ohio -- is distressing in a more personal way.

The book also gave me the larger background, which made it far more damning. It puts us inside a small portion of the chaos created by the occupation itself, which anyone in her right mind could have predicted would lead to ongoing revolt; it shows us some of the consequences of the wholesale arrests of bystanders and civilians; it adds up what we know about the famous torture memos, the disavowal of the Geneva Conventions, the abrogation of habeas corpus, and the general trampling on the moral compass of the nation, the entire 1984-like nightmare that we've all been watching with slackened jaws.

Here's some of what the book gave me that I didn't already know:
--The distressing chain of document errors, willful legal misinterpretations, and the strange game of "telephone" between D.C.'s official policies and prison local implementation ... which resulted in an entire prison's worth of people being treated like sacks of meat with no human value. How could there have been no serious review, anywhere along the line??
--The incompetence of putting untrained and unprepared reservists in charge of daily oversight of prisoners with no manuals, no guidance whatsoever.
--The shock of seeing central military functions fully outsourced, with civilian contractors paid to torture, apparently with no oversight and no accountability.
--The shame and demoralization of officers who tried to--and could not--arrange for the release of some of the innocent bystanders who had been swept up in random security sweeps.
--The regular refusal of moral responsibility up and down the chain of command, as people under pressure worked to satisfy Rumsfeld's demand for information, and were never held accountable for the resulting criminal behavior--including torturing and even killing ordinary civilians.

I think that's my first outburst. More later in the week. Meanwhile, three questions for Philip.

Small question: why didn't you ever use Rumsfeld's name? Was it a literary device to call him only "the secretary of defense," an attempt to show that the nation at large was responsible for what happened?

Medium question: Were you ever frustrated by the limitations of your material? Errol Morris, genius though he may be, did not ask all the probing intellectual questions or do the in-depth investigative research that I suspect you would have. And I see that you used his structure, revealing small insights along the way. Were there others you would have interviewed, or questions you would have asked, had it been your project alone?

Larger question: Do you really believe that there will be no accountability whatsoever? I assumed that Morris's full court press -- the movie, the blogging, the collaboration with you, even your appearance here -- was aiming toward some sort of policy response. Do you truly not expect the Democrats to hold anyone accountable or at least to expose and attack the thinking and the policies behind them?