"I know I'm not part of this, but it kind of makes you feel like you are."
First, a housekeeping note: in addition to my main posts (and I know this is a long one, which I hope you'll find worth chewing over), as this Book Club unfolds, I have been weighing in fairly regularly in the comments section. So that's a heads-up for anyone interested to check out the rolling discussion after my first post, and my response to E.J. Graff's questions, and my account after Mary Karr's latest post of the prisoner nicknamed Gus, who appeared naked and prone at the end of Lynndie England's leash in the infamous photograph.
Meanwhile, Nick Flynn has left comments scolding me for "inexplicably" omitting from the book the voices of the Iraqi prisoners who appear in the Abu Ghraib photographs. "In a project that declared as its primary focus to understand those in the photographs," Flynn says, "I was disappointed to be offered only the MPs versions of those nights." The thing is - that's not the primary focus of my project. On the contrary, when I explain my decision not to include in the book the photographs which have so dominated and, at times, distorted perceptions of the Abu Ghraib story, I write: "In attempting here to see the story afresh it became clear that much of what matters most about Abu Ghraib was never photographed. The photographs have a place in the story, but they are not the story, and it would be untruthful here to submit once again to their frame."
Similarly my decision to tell the story through American eyes and voices is quite explicit in the book. Nick Flynn may disapprove- and Mary Karr has already responded to him about that in a post of her own (which is where I, in turn, respond to his misrepresentations of my account of the prisoner known as Gus) - but I'm happy to revisit the larger issue here, because Flynn's complaints about the book that I didn't write offer a good occasion to explain how I went about the book that I did write.
I tell the Americans' story here, because the story of Abu Ghraib, like the story of the larger Iraq war, and the still larger and longer war on terror, is an American story. Here's a snippet of how I put it in the book:
The stain is ours, because whatever else the Iraq war was about, it was always, above all, about America - about the projection of America's force and America's image into the world. Iraq was the stage, and Iraqis would suffer for that, enduring some fifty deaths for every American life lost: in this, and by every other measure of devastation, it was very much their war. But... the war was not their choice. It was an American war because America's elected officials decided to wage it of their own initiative, "at a time of our choosing," as the president said, and it was a war about America because it was fought in the name of our freedom and the world's. What was at stake, for the war's advocates, skeptics, and opponents alike, was an American story - the story of America as a champion of law and liberty at home and abroad, a tough but righteous arbiter of the destiny of nations, intolerant only of intolerance, a scourge to rogue regimes and bandit dictators who usurp the innate craving of all humankind to aspire to her example.
To put it bluntly, the story of Abu Ghraib was not that Iraqi prisoners were being brutally abused - that was the norm in Iraq. The story was that Americans were doing the abusing - and that they were doing it as a matter of policy. Perhaps a massacre like we saw at Hadditha is inevitable in a war of this scale: rogue soldiers on a rampage, followed by a cover-up. But the scandal of Abu Ghraib is different - the scandal of prisoner abuse and torture is precisely that it was not inevitable, that it had to be licensed, encouraged, sanctioned as policy, and nobody could have known when we invaded that a combination of bewildering incompetence, amateurism and a radically malign rewriting of the rules of interrogation, would come together to create a systematic hell on the scale of Abu Ghraib.
So to hear the American soldiers who served in that hell explain themselves is of great interest, particularly when they are not denying the cruelty they inflicted. It is also far more powerful and more convincing and more damning to hear those people who are agents of violence describe the harm they did to their victims than to hear the victims describe it. A pure victim has no agency in his predicament; he makes no significant moral choices; he does not act, he is acted upon. That's why I never felt that the Iraqi voices were missing, as I was not trying to tell their stories - and, as I say in the book, I chose to call the prisoners by the nicknames the American soldiers gave them, because I saw no need to further the victimization and exposure of those who might well be innocent.
And the nicknames were interesting, too, because - however crudely - they actually re-humanized prisoners whom the American soldiers were officially supposed to refer to by their five-digit ID numbers. This constant ricochet between dehumanization and re-humanization is also part of the story of what happened at that prison.
Sabrina Harman, whom I wrote about in the New Yorker, expressed that ricochet powerfully in letters she wrote home from Abu Ghraib as the abuse was going on. From these letters, it is clear that it was not only the Iraqis' humanity that suffered from the interrogators' regime of abuse. The MPs, too, felt their souls slipping away as they made their wards miserable. And it should be understood that Harman and the other female MPs were used by their male colleagues to point and jeer at naked Iraqi men to add to their sexual humiliation. In this way, American women were sexually abused by being made into instruments of sexual abuse. No wonder that Harman said, "We were prisoners, too," a sentiment another MP guard, Javal Davis, shared - and which finds an echo in the title of Jeffrey Goldberg's memoir of his service as a military prison guard in Israel as well.
Years ago, in Rwanda, I heard of plans to begin integrating former members of the ancien regime's genocidal army into the new post-genocide national military. In an interview, I asked the country's leader, Paul Kagame, if he really believed that you could just turn a soldier around like that. Sure, he said. People, he said, "can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good." It struck me as simultaneously the most cynical and the most hopeful thing you could say about human beings and power and politics and violence. The point was obvious: leadership matters, discipline matters - people will do as they are told.
Read the "counseling statement" that Captain Christopher Brinson issued to Charles Graner one day at Abu Ghraib after Graner had walked a hooded prisoner into a wall and banged him up so badly that he - Graner - had to give the captive stitches. Brinson, whose civilian job was as the legislative director and homeland security liaison for Congressman Mike Rogers, an Alabama Republican on the Armed Services Committee, wrote to his soldier: "CPL Graner you are doing a fine job... As the NCOIC of the 'MI Hold' are, you have many accolades from the MI units here and specifically from LTC Jordan. Continue to perform at this level and it will help us succeed at our overall mission." As Sergeant Javal Davis said of Graner, "He got an attaboy!"
Was Graner a sadist? Perhaps. But it required a much larger climate of command permission and approval for him to give expression to his dark impulses. Now Graner is serving a ten year sentence, while Brinson has never been held to account for the conduct of his troops whom he visited on most nights on the MI block at Abu Ghraib.
I was aware, as I wrote this book, that it would have to overcome considerable resistance in most readers. It asks you to extend sympathy to people whom it is much easier to think of simply as villains. Amongst the commentariat of this book club, certainly, it seems there is little eagerness to give up having the "bad apples" to despise. Decrying our soldiers at Abu Ghraib as simply "evil" allows us to assure ourselves that we know we would have behave better. But that's where we would begin lying to ourselves. We don't know how we'd behave until we're tested. Good leaders go to great lengths to insure those under their command are never put to the tests that extreme license and corrupt orders entail. But when that test comes, history shows us clearly that as many on the left will fail as on the right - there is no ideological immunity to human malleability - so there's no taking refuge in the moral superiority of saying you would never do this or do that.
That is what I admire in the posts of Mary Karr and Jeffrey Goldberg - the way they identify quite readily with the terrible dilemmas that the lowest ranking soldiers confronted at Abu Ghraib. E.J. Graff says these are the people she went to high school with in Ohio, and she too makes the imaginative leap. So I'm distressed to see them mocked for this by some commentators whose preset tones of knowing superiority strike me as dangerously smug and remote from reality. To see the MPs as instruments of great injustice and as objects of great injustice, is not to exonerate them or absolve anyone of individual responsibility - but rather to attempt to grapple with the nature of reality where untrained young men and women who volunteered to serve their country were sent to serve as prison guards at a time when their nation had decided to replace their laws with a program of abuse and torture. Writing this book, I came to see the MPs like figures from a Theodore Dreiser or Frank Norris novel - sweeping towards their social fates. To feel sympathy for them is to feel an even greater outrage about the crimes and injustices they have come to represent.
One of the lines where that happens most vividly for me in Standard Operating Procedure is spoken by an MP named Tony Diaz, who was in the position one morning of having to help a CIA interrogator by hoisting the hooded body of a prisoner who was hanging by a pair of handcuffs from a window frame. At some point in his manipulations of the prisoner, Diaz realized, "This guy's not even alive." He still resisted saying that the man was dead, even though Army pathologists had classified him right away as a homicide victim. And when Diaz described lifting the prisoner's hood and seeing his battered face, he said, "I even got some blood on my uniform because he was dripping. And it kind of felt bad, because I know I'm not part of this, but it kind of makes you feel like you are."
I keep coming back and back to that line - "I know I'm not part of this, but it kind of makes you feel like you are." It seems to me to sum up the way so many of us felt when we first saw the Abu Ghraib photographs and recoiled from them: that sense of complicity and at the same time of being a bystander - the disassociation even as the stain soaks in.
E.J. Graff asked in her post if I wrote this book with the aim of sparking accountability and prosecutions of those on high. I told her I didn't. I have no such delusions about what I do. I would feel the book was working if at some point in the claustrophobic coils of its story, you surprised yourself by nodding along with Tony Diaz: "I know I'm not part of this, but it kind of makes you feel like you are."
Really?
"Let's be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the openness. Past administrations kept their "black ops" secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were committed in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush administration has broken this deal: post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimised by new definitions and new laws."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/dec/10/usa.comment
The Phoenix program in Vietnam was a large interrogation and torture effort, and there have been similar efforts in every war, on all sides. When you get war you also get the full package including detention, harsh interrogation, torture, rape and random killing. It's not a walk in the park.
June 25, 2008 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
'To see the MPs as instruments of great injustice and as objects of great injustice, is not to exonerate them or absolve anyone of individual responsibility - but rather to attempt to grapple with the nature of reality where untrained young men and women who volunteered to serve their country were sent to serve as prison guards at a time when their nation had decided to replace their laws with a program of abuse and torture.'
I remember reading "Firepower" by Chris Dempster and Dave Tompkins, and their account of serving under "Colonel Callan" (Costas Georgiou) as mercenaries in Angola (there's an interesting ongoing discussion about this, btw, that includes posts by David Tompkins here: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=71833). Georgiou started out o.k. in Angola fighting alongside the FNLA, but later went on to commit many murders (including 11 to 14 of his own men) and was ultimately captured and executed by the MPLA.
Many of those who signed on to serve as mercenaries in Angola had no real military training and found themselves way over their heads when trying to deal with the sort of moral ambiguity that always surrounds war. The real failure, however, was that Georgiou himself let that ambiguity get the best of him. In this sense I feel like our army is being morphed into a mercenary outfit -- a group of people with no real moral code who are taught to do anything for the sake of "accomplishing the mission". This isn't the fault of the guys on the ground; rather, those who command the military seem to believe that having "a certain moral flexibility" (to quote John Cusak's character in "Grosse Point Blank") somehow provides an operational advantage in the "War on Terrorism". Unfortunately, just as those mercenaries learned in Angola, lowering the standards of professional conduct and allowing "moral flexibility" to creep in only makes our military weaker and easier to defeat in battle.
June 25, 2008 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
When one of the nation's top foreign relations columnists describes our incursion into Iraq as one that, beyond any specific strategic or national security goals, was intended to convey the message "Suck on this!" to the Arab world after 911, it is difficult to dissociate the US mission in Iraq from the sexual humiliation rituals which have characterized much of the brutality there.
The mission to "kick Arab ass" and to collectively humiliate the Muslim world as a response to the attacks in New York and Washington was articulated and dog-whistled in our national discourse, heard loud and clear by our unscrupulous politicians, and executed by our recruits on the ground. To the extent that a New York Times columnist was candid about the sexual himiliation metaphor behind military shock and awe, and that such views were accepted and embraced by the general public, the sanctioning of the behavior at Abu Ghraib began well beyond the walls of policy-makers' offices in Washington. It was the culmination of the average Joe's anger gone awry.
Lynndie England was acting out the policy articulated by Thomas Friedman and other participants in our national discourse. It is increasingly clear that the buck does end at the president's desk where Ms England's crimes are concerned, but we are as yet to grapple with the collective discourse which not so tacitly gave license to our leaders.
June 25, 2008 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Gourevitch, you have helped me put my finger on something that has been disturbing me about the course of this entire Book Club conversation.
One can’t argue with your artistic or journalistic choice to tell the American side of the Abu Ghraib story. No doubt, that is an important and interesting story to tell. But one can certainly argue with your parochial notion that the American story is the story of Abu Ghraib. One can argue with these sentiments:
I tell the Americans' story here, because the story of Abu Ghraib, like the story of the larger Iraq war, and the still larger and longer war on terror, is an American story.
The stain is ours, because whatever else the Iraq war was about, it was always, above all, about America - about the projection of America's force and America's image into the world.
To put it bluntly, the story of Abu Ghraib was not that Iraqi prisoners were being brutally abused - that was the norm in Iraq. The story was that Americans were doing the abusing - and that they were doing it as a matter of policy.
These assertions strike me as startlingly self-absorbed. And the self I am talking about is not yourself, Philip Gourevitch, but that great corporate American Self on whose behalf you propose to speak, and whose collective guilt you wish to expose and delineate.
Confession and expiation can be just as self-absorbed as the crimes that give rise to these acts of contrition. “See our stain!” you seem to say. “See the beauty of our guilt! See the redeeming eloquence of our account of our transgressions! See how willingly and magnificently we drive the nails through our own wrists and ankles! We are guilty, guilty, guilty ... and yet, we are nobly guilty, so admirably and articulately and awe-inspiringly conscious of our guilt, are we not? How could the repulsively passive and banal sufferings of our beastly victims – those film extras of life, with their annoying and inconvenient names and identities - possibly measure up to the drama of our confession and reckoning! They exist only as the necessary human props for the spectacle of our atonement. Whether we do great good or great evil, the story must remain our story.”
And yet, we might imagine some uncooperative Iraqi writer of the future who chooses to tell the story of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib, a story in which all of the men on leashes, those heaped into pyramids or stuffed into body bags, have names and families and lives that extend before, and sometimes after, their incarcerations, and have affecting stories to be told. That writer might tell a story in which the torturers are just faceless and anonymous foreigners, mere nodes in a tedious historical line diagram extending into the past and the future, the unimportant successors of the torturers unleashed British and Saddam, and the unimportant antecedents of the torturers yet to come.
Will you then dare tell that writer that he missed the real story?
You say that the Iraqis were mere victims, and to dwell on them and give them names and identities is to prolong their victimization. And yet you portray Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman and Javal Davis as victims of their male comrades. And you have no problem using their names.
I can imagine the writers of the Gospels being upbraided by a Gourevitch of old: “You are spending far too much time on this Jesus character! He’s just a victim; a passive and powerless receptacle of the action poured into him by others. You really shouldn’t even use his name, since that only prolongs his ignoble victimization. Don’t you realize this story is all about the Romans? It’s a story about the projection of Roman power. It’s about the breather of occidental form into inert oriental matter; about the presser of the imperial seal into the subjected wax. And it’s an affecting story about those sad Roman centurions, forced by their remote masters on the Tiber to torture their prisoners with whips and thorns, and to pound nails into the flesh. We must tell those soldiers’ stories!”
June 25, 2008 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I recall seeing Ssymour Hersh on television positing several times, and strongly, that the reaction of many he had spoken with in the Islamic/Arab world was not shock at the torture, which they expected we would end up doing or were already doing, and which they don't find as shocking as we do, but that they were shocked at the sexual nature of the torture. And that that is where that culture saw special depravity, and they saw it as particularly American.
You like that sort of generalized anthropological musing about "the other" better?
With something as grave as this, I think step one is people of each culture first examining their own reaction and publishing on that, not trying to speak for the other; we aren't out of step one yet.
June 25, 2008 4:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
It was after reading Seymour Hersh's account of the My Lai massacre many years ago that I lost the idea that we Americans were somehow different and hold a special place in history. Abu Graib and Guantanomo and the rest of the rot that we now all share as our legacy makes us no better than the Nazis. When we allow it to stand and so long as Cheney and the rest of their ilk walk as free men we can only hang our heads in shame.
June 25, 2008 6:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you do know the victims, Dan, they're us. The taxi cab driver, the school teacher, the guy down the street, the woman who walks her dog everyday, the thief who steals your wallet, the hooker on the street corner, the librarian, the father, the brother, the sister, the mother, the kid who cuts through your yard on the way to school - the same kind of people as the victimizers.
June 25, 2008 5:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Blessings on you, Dan K.
June 25, 2008 4:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
How about getting back to the larger picture and important facts which shaped these events?
This book conversation seems to have turned entirely to characterizations of the people involved and human drama aspects. I find that dramatization to be part of the titillation and DrPhilification of the MSM, and consequent neglect and cover up of useful information.
Some things we could otherwise discuss:
What about the CIA and intelligence officers present at Abu Ghraib who seemed to rely on abuses to "soften up" detainees.
What about the decisions made throughout the chain of command which seemed determined to create this scenario.
What about the torture and extraordinary rendition happening elsewhere with the full knowledge of top military and civilian leaders.
Does the book cover those issues and the larger picture?
June 25, 2008 4:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd suggest that the "larger picture and important facts which shaped these events" is first and foremost the neoconservative ideology which drove Iraq policy.
Even if not addressed in SOP, the underlying radical assumptions of neoconservatism (e.g. it is acceptable to wage preventative war at the President's discretion) are Step One in answering the question many have posted: how do we ensure Abu Ghraib is never repeated?
Legal definitions of torture and operational questions about prison location, CIA oversight, etc. are necessary but secondary. Once it becomes morally acceptable to invade a country or torture for a "higher purpose," people will ignore or hack official limits on behavior.
It reminds me of failed efforts to pass federal Anti-Lynching laws in the 1920's. Until segregationist ideology was thoroughly discredited and its proponents shamed from the public square, White Supremacists in the US Senate filibustered, won re-election, and the lynchings continued.
June 26, 2008 12:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
True, but that's also far too generalized. I'm trying to get to: who, made what decision specifically, when, that led to X.
For example, who put CIA interrogators into Iraq and allowed them to rely on MPs "softening up" prisoners?
Who, in the military chain of command, made the decisions such as locating prisoners in Saddam Hussein's gulag, while it was still in the midst of a combat zone no less?
Who in the civilian and military chain of command coordinated between CIA interrogators and this awful, but wholly predictable, and even deliberate outcome in Abu Ghraib?
Why aren't the people in the chain of command who deliberately orchestrated this FUBAR being held accountable, rather than us dramatizing the actions of a few soldiers?
June 26, 2008 5:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's always easier to call people who do this "monsters" - that way we don't have to admit that they are as human as we are and human beings are capable of such squalid thinking. We don't have to take responsiblity for their actions because they're less than human - they're monsters, some sort of subspecies, a mutated form of human beings that are so unlike us that they deserve neither pity nor understanding.
This of course is the same kind of thinking that allowed the authorities and the administration to reconcile their consciences. They weren't torturing these people, that was left to the personnel, the help, the rivetheads on the line, those grunts who weren't considered as human beings by their own government. That's why Donald Rumsfeld can so blithely say "we go to war with the army we have" because it means as much to him as those plastic soldiers he played with as a kid, that army that he had, not the one he wanted. It wouldn't matter if torturing dehumanized them, they weren't considered human in the first place. Rumsfeld couldn't be bothered to sign letters of condolence to the families who lost loved ones in this war, it didn't even occur to him to do so until he was shamed into doing so.
E.J. Graff says she knows these people, she grew up with these kind of people in southern Ohio. I believe her, but people who grew up in New Haven Ct know these people too - they went to school with them, they pledged fraternities with them, they lived in frat houses and dorms with them, the difference between those people and these people is these people can afford to pay those people to do their dirty work for them - they can go to church on Sunday and play a round of golf knowing that the trash is being carried out by the help and they don't even have to issue the order, someone else is being paid to do that.
I feel great pity and compassion for these soldiers because they are human beings who deserve it. After seeing these pictures I have pity and compassion for the German people who claimed not to have known what was happening in their names. We don't want to confront this as a nation because to do so is to admit that we're the nazis now, we're the German people who lived beside such cruelty and assauged their consciences by thinking they were removed from it, they weren't nazis, they had no control, it was out of their power.
The Germans simply couldn't bear to think they were capable of such cruelty and infliction of suffering, it was easier to blame the nazis, not the culture that allowed them to flourish. Americans don't want to these soldiers as human beings deserving of pity - if they deserve pity that means that this kind of behavior isn't an abberation or an anomoly, it is behavior condoned by our society, encouraged by our society and created by our society, behavior that occurs in our society every day of the week, everywhere in this country.
We created it, we allowed it to happen and now we have to find a way to live with it and if that means pinning the crime on a few so the many can sleep at night, we'll do that - it's easier that way.
June 25, 2008 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly. The purpose of basic training is to dehumanize "the boy next door." No rational human can be expected to kill another in a far-off country, so recruits are turned into automatons, to kill, kill, kill. This killer, created by the state, is a mere tool of the state, to be used up and then cast aside. Stop-loss, multiple tours, drugging which promotes suicide, mandated mis-diagnosis of PTSD, neglect by the VA -- all continuations of the dehumanizing under which they were recruited using false promises in the first place.
So these weren't "Americans," in the usual sense of the word, that were doing the torturing. They were creations of the state, many of them now broken and wasted when they think about what the state manipulated them to do. We see them on the freeway off-ramps with styrofoam cups in their hands.
That applies both to the tortured and the torturer.
You need to go deeper. The situation is worse than you think. These people can't tell you what actually happened. It's not the policy that was the problem, it's militarization in its deepest sense, the use of citizens as tools of the state in its organized assaults on other peoples. The torturers can't explain why they tortured any more than the tortured can explain why they were victims.
June 25, 2008 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
I see your point and agree with much of it. I don't agree that the military makes them automatons who kill, kill, kill, in fact, I think it's the opposite. They use guilt, guilt that they're going to let down their buddies, guilt that they're going to let down their unit and guilt that they're going to let down the U.S. army. In every war memoir I've ever read, the single motivator was "I was afraid if I didn't do it I'd let my buddy/ies down". They are not machines or automatons, they're human beings, for the most part kids, for whom the group is the only thing of real importance to them, especially in combat or fear situations, where if you don't support the group, maybe when you need the group it won't support you. So people do things they might not do if they were not in that group.
Frankly, I don't believe that these soldiers were punished and accepted that punishment because they tortured Iraqis, I think they were punished and accepted their punishment because they let down their unit and the army by photographing it and putting the behavior on display. I don't doubt that they believe it themselves - how else can you explain that meek acceptance of a punishment that those most culpable escaped?
More and more I see the flaws in Teilhard's philosophy - everything that rises doesn't converge, it just dissipates.
June 25, 2008 9:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Black Commentator
Issue 133 - April 7 2005
Aiden Delgado, an Army Reservist in the 320th Military Police Company, served in Iraq from April 1st , 2003 through April 1st, 2004. After spending six months in Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq, he spent six months helping to run the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.
The handsome 23-year-old mechanic was a witness to widespread, almost daily, U.S. war crimes in Iraq. His story contains new revelations about ongoing brutality at Abu Ghraib, information yet to be reported in national media.
Delgado says he observed mutilation of the dead, trophy photos of dead Iraqis, mass roundups of innocent noncombatants, positioning of prisoners in the line of fire – all violations of the Geneva conventions. His own buddies – decent, Christian men, as he describes them – shot unarmed prisoners.
In one government class for seniors, Delgado presented graphic images, his own photos of a soldier playing with a skull, the charred remains of children, kids riddled with bullets, a soldier from his unit scooping out the brains of a prisoner. Some students were squeamish, like myself, and turned their heads. Others rubbed tears from their eyes. But at the end of the question period, many expressed appreciation for opening a subject that is almost taboo. “If you are old enough to go to war,” Delgado said, “you are old enough to know what really goes on.”
extract from the interview:
DELGADO: I went to Fort Knox for basic training. It was known to be harsher than other bases. The training was mentally taxing, and there was already some anti-Arab sentiment.
Q: Like what?
DELGADO: In the early stages I remember Army chants. We sang in cadences. And the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads, killing the Taliban.
Q: What did the chants say?
DELGADO: It was three years ago. I can’t tell the exact words, but the sentiment was to burn turbans and kill ragheads. That was the phraseology. Our drill sergeants would give us motivational talks to pump up our fighting spirit. The theme was the need to get revenge, to go to the Middle East to fight Arabs.
Q: All this was before you even went to Iraq?
DELGADO: Yes. My own commander was infamous for anti-Arab speeches. Before we were deployed to the Middle East, he said, “Now don’t go tell the media that you’re going over there to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.” Everybody laughed, and he laughed with them. I remember standing there in formation, having grown up in Egypt. And I was thinking: “Oh, my God, this is going to be a disaster. Our commander has this anti-Arab attitude even before we go over.” The commander would give lectures about Islam. He said that Muslims advocate a holy war against us, that Islam promotes perpetual war. I’ve been surrounded by Muslims for a decade, exposed to their culture. He is wrong.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/133/133_think_racism_military_pf.html
June 26, 2008 12:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is what I mean, Don. For some people it's always there, just below the surface, the war is the excuse to allow it to break through. The army reflects our society - the parent who tortures her child to death, the husband who beats up his wife, the prisons where they rape and kill and steal from one another, the father who rapes his little girl, but rather than look at ourselves and ask why we're like this, we prefer to blame the military, the "monsters" the "sociopaths", the few "bad apples" or claim it's "God's will" so that we never, ever, have to take responsibility and acknowledge that it is there in all of us, just beneath the surface.
June 26, 2008 8:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
I spent twenty years in the Army and I can assure you that that is not the case. In no other societal cohort are normal young people turned into killers. It's necessary -- war is all about killing. These young people are not latent killers, torturers and rapists. The whole purpose of basic training is to convert a thinking young man or woman into a blank slate, and then re-program that person to blindly obey orders while ensuring the continued viability of the unit and its members. Try to get a combat infantryman to talk about his experiences -- it's usually impossible. Those experiences are so inhuman and painful that they're better off not being recalled. And if they are recalled, they may not be truthful or accurate, which is why a book based on interviews with torturers is highly questionable to me.
The Army did reflect our society to some degree when there was a draft. You'd find college graduates, Cuban refugees, Hispanics, blacks, Yankees, rednecks etc. in an infantry unit and a lot of them acted like part-time help, because they were. It was kind of cool. This situation finally, around 1970, led to the breakdown of an Army which saw the futility of Vietnam. Now we have a volunteer Army, mostly from small towns where there is no future, professional "warriors" receiving huge bonuses for enlisting and re-enlisting. The Army is more divorced from society than ever, and its members more subject to mis-use and neglect than ever. That's the pity.
We are not all torturers "just beneath the surface." I reject that completely. What we all are, at least those of us who are teens in small towns, are candidates for abuse by corrupt politicians promoting the profitable war racket.
June 26, 2008 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
You nailed it, Bev. You got to the underlying dilemma.
"War is the excuse".
The excuse for what?
For the release of pent-up sadomasochism; to temporarily and fruitlessly free the tortured national/cultural psyche by inflicting it on others, spreading it around instead of dealing with and healing it, thereby perpetuating it to emerge another day, another generation, another century, ad infinitum - all without relief or release from its grip and pain.
(The release of pent-up sadomasochism is directed inward in a society as well, usually using the excuse of an external threat. Witness the impotent warped psyches of the Freeper types who would choose to disappear at least half this country if they could. This also includes the Freeper types - called Neocons when wearing suits - running the White House; and you wondered what all the illegal surveilance was about!)
War is like an entity that has to be exorcised. Until it is exposed and treated, everyone suffers, some much more than others.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission every generation, backed by a constitutional amendment, is the least that can be done and maybe the only thing that can help.
June 26, 2008 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
The idea that, just below the surface, we all derive pleasure from the infliction of physical or mental pain either on others or on oneself, and this otherwise confined urge is released in war, do you have any proof of that?
I'll be outside tearing the legs off my cat while you're looking it up.
June 26, 2008 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Exactly, because not everyone in the army is a sadistic, amoral "monster" and everyone in civil society is normal and moral. I fully understand what Don is saying, my point is that the army doesn't create them, it just provides them with the excuse to act out. If the army turned these kids into killing machines, society itself would not continue and these people could not be turned out in society. Yes, some do get that message, but most do not, just as some in society get that message and most do not.
Why so many combat soldiers break down is because it is unnatural for them to kill. The overwhelming cause of ptsd is guilt, almost all of them say that the guilt has crippled them emotionally.
I'm having great difficulty in explaining my point - the culture in that prison and that unit is part of the culture of the U.S. at large and we seem to have a standardized approach to problem solving in our culture that includes an acceptable level of violence.
June 26, 2008 4:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Is it natural or unnatural to kill?
Do civilians get ptsd and emotional crippling from their atrocities?
June 26, 2008 6:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Gourevitch, please accept my compliments and my gratitude to you for being so consistently and mind-bogglingly excellent at what you do.
It is not, as an earlier commenter asserted, patriarchal to define this story as an American story, under any circumstance I can think of, excepting a hypothetical storyteller who having thus defined it, goes on sincerely to argue that its events were, in essence, exemplary of America's moral obligation to torture Iraqis for their own good.
That is not Mr. Gourevitch's stance, as I understand it. His points are eminently well taken, and, in fact, a less nuanced and more bitter person -- for example, me in a comment elsewhere on this site in June -- might have argued that it is not only a profoundly American story, but profoundly meaningful when told that way by saying:
Mr. Gourevitch is an admirable exception to my excessively blunt and bitter allegations. And his patient reiteration of his explicitly stated reasons for telling the story as he did are an improvement on it -- ie, to revert to bluntness, I'm not trying to put my words in his mouth. I might wish I could do the reverse. But if wishes were horses, blog commenters would ride. And so forth.
On the inevitability tip, on the other hand, I gotta respectfully dissent. But since first-responder Don Bacon already made that case as well as anyone could in non-book-length form, happily, I can get out of it with compliments all around, and no consequences to anyone that are any worse than my own assessment of myself as a good German. Fun times.
My thanks again to Mr. Gourevitch for his stellar and genuinely very much appreciated work.
June 26, 2008 7:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dear Mr Gourevitch,
Thank you for engaging in this conversation—as I’ve said, I have enormous respect for your work, and I have no objection to your focus on the MPs, but I’d like to respond to two things you wrote in response to my comments in Mary Karr’s post.
You wrote: “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 remind everyone, “Gus” (aka “Amir”) is the man in the photograph on Lynndie England’s leash]
To clarify, here are the a few of the quotes from SOP that made me feel that the MPs were describing the treatment of Gus that night as anodyne:
“ . . . he didn’t get hurt . . . . The medics, Ambuhl said, had approved the way he handled Gus under the circumstances” (p142)
“. . . England scoffed at the idea that the photograph depicted sexual humiliation. “Just because Gus is naked?” she asked. (p139)
“My concern was whatever it took to keep him from getting hurt.” (p142, medic auch)
It is of interest to hear how the MPs and medics describe that night, but the conclusion you come to seems to endorse their version—“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 that this is one of the central theses of SOP, the way photographs make us feel we know a story when in fact we know nothing. And I agree that there were things going on at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere that were much worse than what the photos reveal, and I’m grateful for the insights you provide on those important points. But what of the leash? I’m sure it was used, at times, to protect psychotic prisoners from hurting themselves, but it is also important to note that in the fall of 2002, at Guantanamo, a prisoner named al-Qatahni had a leash tied to him, was dragged around, and was forced to perform “dog-tricks”—exactly what “Gus” claims happened to him that night, two years later. Because of this, I can more readily believe that the photographs of a naked human pyramid was a product of an MP’s id than I can believe that putting a man on a leash was, for the simple fact that it was being done elsewhere, which suggests that it, like putting a hooded man on a box, was more of what is euphemistically called an “enhanced technique” than anything a few yahoos on the night shift spontaneously invented.
But I can also believe that Graner probably had some nights where he wasn’t such a sadist, where he might have acted humanely toward a prisoner—I just have a hard time believing it was this night. And, for the record, I also have a hard time picturing Graner tidying up a cell for the next prisoner: “Graner had an MI prisoner who was supposed to be put in the hole . . . and he wanted to clean it up first” (p136). And this says nothing to take away his humanity—I’m not one of those who would call him a monster.
In response to my post you also wrote: “I'm puzzled that you base your complaint about the absence of Iraqis on the prisoner nicknamed Gus -- since he is the prisoner whose plight I feature most prominently. He has, in fact, the last word in the book.”
The problem with this is that you actually do not feature “Gus” most prominently, you feature versions of the night he was photographed on the leash as told by those leading him around on the leash. And “Gus” does not have the last word in your book—you do. You speculate that because of his resistance, he is the closest thing there was at AG to a free man. I have just sent him an email, which may take a while to get back to me, to ask him what he thinks of that.
About that photograph you also wrote this: “England seems to answer all the questions that her absence would raise, creating a sense of direct agency—falsely, according to everyone who was there: she becomes the violator” (p149).
“According to everyone who was there”—except “Gus.” As I said in an earlier post, The Physicians for Human Rights have just released a report called "Broken Laws, Broken Lives," and “Gus’s” transcript of the events of that night can be found at http://brokenlives.info/, under the name “Amir.” Back to the photographs: yes, it took 20 seconds to take the three photographs of “Gus” on the leash, and yes, the leash is slack in England’s hand, but this says nothing of what happened next, of whether the leash was tightened after the photos were taken, or not, which, as I understand it, is one of your points about the nature of photographs. So why come to the conclusion that “the pictures look worse. . . than the reality they depict?” In the testimony I was present at, the night ends with England breaking “Gus’s” finger under her boot.
As I’ve said, one can write a book solely from the American perspective on Abu Ghraib, but I’m less convinced that one should then also speak for Iraqis, who are forced to remain silent. The thing is, I know that Errol Morris had complete access to “Gus,” as well as to any of the other ex-detainees (at least the ones still alive), as Morris was in contact with the same lawyer who introduced me to them. Yet he has said in press materials that he “couldn’t locate them.” But I don’t expect you to answer for Morris. I only bring it up because it, perhaps, points to one of the reasons that Abu Ghraib happened—that is, the ways we are able to make “the other” invisible. And this isn’t meant to sound in any way scolding, its not about me or you, it’s really about a larger crisis in our culture. I know that you, and your book, are also searching out the deeper roots of this on-going crisis, and I respect you for it.
June 26, 2008 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
The lines that you keep plucking from the book to suggest that I make Gus's treatment sound anodyne illustrate the way the soldiers described the scene with Gus. That doesn't mean I subscribe to their view. And, yes, of course, those soldiers are minimizing his suffering -- and I make that abundantly clear in the book. Those lines come from an account several pages long of those minutes surrounding the photographs of Lynndie holding his "leash," in which I describe Gus being held in naked in the hole -- "a solid-doored, windowless, lightless, waterless, toiletless, unfurnished, concrete isolation cell" - where he had soiled himself. I describe him emerging from that cell in a "low-crawl" position, dragging his naked, feces-stained belly and genitals across the concrete floor, I describe him in the first photoraph where his body is fully legible by saying, "He looks like a man writihing in pain," and in the next photograph, I say: "Gus's face is finally visible, and his eyes are eerie -- rolled back in his head, flashing white." And I begin this whole description by saying that Lynndie thought the whole incident was "no big deal," and I end it by quoting her dismissing the notion that there was sexual humiliation involved with these words: "Just because Gus is naked? That's standard operating procedure."
I'm sorry, but it did not seem to me that I had failed to represent Gus's treatment as appalling. I did not think I had to point out that the soldiers, in making the case that they hadn't been dragging Gus around on the leash as it appeared in the photos, were nonetheless making light of what he had gone through that the camera only hinted at but did not really show. I did not think I had to contradict and argue with every statement they made as they made it because I did not think polemic was needed to represent them accurately. It never occurred to me that I was exonerating them or belittling Gus's suffering because I wasn't. On the contrary -- I was saying that such suffering was so systemic at Abu Ghraib that the head medic thought, well, OK, if that picture represents the best we can do, so be it. Do I really need to quote the prisoner himself to say that's outrageous? I sure hope not.
Finally, it's careless to say that you can't believe Graner could have behaved cruelly and decently on the same night, or that you know he's not the kind of guy who would clean out a cell. He was a soldier. Soldiers beat up prisoners, and soldiers cleaned up afterwards. That's what they were supposed to do. Maybe he was a bad soldier, but it sure detracts from your demand for careful attention to the particulars of individual experience to say you know this guy could only have been vile. Why, as Mary asks in her most recent comment to the responses to the last post, must everybody be all one way or the other?
June 26, 2008 5:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whether to extend sympathy to "bad apples," call them "monsters," "sadists," etc., sounds like a debate over how many Baathists can dance on the head of a pin. Still, Phil Gourevitch wrote:
This is only part of the story, and misses the particular outrage elicited by the infamous photos.
The other part of the story was that Americans apparently enjoyed brutally abusing Iraqi prisoners (as a matter of policy or not) and indulged in deliberate, premeditated mistreatment as a form of entertainment.
I'll say it again: the public would not have been so outraged by --even while finding repellent-- images of US soldiers with straight faces harshly beating Iraqi prisoners who were withholding the location of Saddam's WMDs. People understand and even respect soldiers who must do unpleasant things to win a just war.
And contrary to suggestions that elitism, class or self-righteousness drive antipathy toward Graner, England et. al., my own relatives and friends most like them --including combat vets from Iraq and other conflicts-- have made the harshest, unsympathetic denouncements I've heard anywhere.
Even where Americans had to participate in awful wartime violence and killing, there are few (any?) instances of US soldiers smiling and laughing at corpses for the camera. That's why people get so outraged and can't extend sympathy to the Abu Ghraib perps; concern for the proper adjectives to describe them seems absurd.
June 26, 2008 3:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
I address the issue you raise of the appearance of torture as entertainment in my new post, "The Pleasure Problem" -- thanks for yours.
June 27, 2008 11:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . Lynndie thought the whole incident was "no big deal" . . . .
I wonder why.
June 26, 2008 8:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
philip,
thanks for yr last comment on my post. this will likely be my last.
reading yr accounts in SOP of the way the MPs saw the night "gus" was photographed on the leash was insightful, and I appreciate that you collected them together. it was merely your conclusion, "that once we learn the story, the pictures look worse, more deliberately deviant, than the reality they depict," that troubled me. I am not the only one who seemed to read yr conclusion as an endorsement of the MPs claim that the night was "no big deal." (I dont want to put words in her mouth, but mary karr referred to it in her first post as a "debunking"). but it has been good to be able to ask you to clarify your position, and I appreciate the care you've taken in responding.
June 27, 2008 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink