Robert Stone has just posted some further thoughts to his post from yesterday in response to readers' comments at the bottom of that post. As with everything he writes, you should check it out. He is particularly sharp on the question of whether Abu Ghraib was the deliberate result of policy or the product of pure folly: "I hope nobody thinks that I believe identifying something as a pathetic fuckup automatically excuses it. AG was a crime against humanity -no hyperbole- and a fuckup as well." Yup, and Stone hits it on the head, too, when he addresses the suggestion that crops up repeatedly in the comments that the "bad apples" were psychopaths who merit no sympathy. As he writes: "The responsibility is always partly with the individual but the leadership and placement of these troops, their lack of education, their status as throwaway people from a throwaway poverty belt (All imposed on them by our society and particularly Bush-Cheney) are extenuating. Not exculpatory. Extenuating."

I said in my last post that I would address some points in this week's discussion, so let me start with that last point: the proposition, repeatedly put forward in the comments, that by expressing some sympathy for the MPs who came to be known as the bad apples, I was seeking to let them off the hook. I can assure you that nobody who has read my book, Standard Operating Procedure, has made such a charge.

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The weekend is upon us - it has been a full week here at the book club - so rather than try to land a grand conclusion here after Robert Stone's generous wrap-up, and dark notes of hope, I just want to thank everyone who has joined this discussion of Standard Operating Procedure: the excellent panel of discussants, the commentator-respondents, and the vast silent majority of TPM readers (to whom I belong) who take it in without weighing in, and then go out to spread the words or thoughts they've mulled here. E.J. Graff insists that I understate the purpose or activist ambitions of my work - but I assure you, I do not write to change the world but rather to describe how it is, and with the understanding that if it changes in response to anything I say it may not be at all as I would intend or wish it to go. I write and report, I suppose, because I wouldn't know what else to do with myself - because I have to - and in the hope that what I write will be read by thoughtful people who find it worth taking in and perhaps chewing over. One hardly ever knows if or how that's happening, and a book club like this is therefore truly its own reward.

I will respond, over the coming twenty-four hours, in the comments sections, to a number of points and questions raised in this afternoon's posts. I hope that if you've stayed with the discussion to this point, or just found dipping in and out engaging, you will read the book. There's a lot more to it.

Philip Gourevitch's book and Errol Morris's film Standard Operating Procedure are elements of hope in a very bad time. Moral catastrophe has never been, in my experience, examined with such thoroughness of insight. The writer and filmmaker, each in his own way, subject Abu Ghraib and the perception of it to the most sophisticated scrutiny. Their resistance to moral, political ad even photographic obviousness is downright revivifying. The sheer urgency and energy of their work gives us a measure of relief from the numbing shame we have brought on ourselves. The passion for truth--nothing less--that we find in both the book and the documentary allows us to hope that somehow we can work our way out of the pit we've jumped or fallen or been pushed into.

What do their reflections on Abu Ghraib tell us? For one, in case we haven't noticed it, that the Bush-Cheney operation ought never to have been trusted to supervise the deployment of armed troops. This is not the first time we've seen a FUBAR situation grow out of folly, ignorance and antinomian immorality at the top. The history of the Grenada invasion is worth recalling. Thee are a lot of narratives to choose from in Abu Ghraib. The story of troops terrorizing civilians is eternal. Military organizations are dangerous to everyone, as any veteran will testify. Controlling them responsibly requires common sense and thoughtfulness, insistent decency, rigorous adherence to regulations that are in a humane tradition. Requires everything, in other words, that the Bush people so conspicuously lack.

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... In Which E.J. Acknowledges Her Sense of Inadequacy in Responding to Gourevitch & Morris's Standard Operating Procedure, And Yet Does So Anyway

Given the enormity of what we're discussing, and given the fact that unlike others here I am not steeped in questions about war, torture, policing, and related issues, apparently the only way I can write another book club post is to begin by mocking my inadequacies. I signed up to discuss this book for two reasons: first, my sense of overwhelming shame and responsibility, as an American citizen, for the degeneration of my country into one that stands for torture, indefinite detention, "black sites," "extraordinary rendition," and so on. And two, my sense of profound awe at how Morris and Gourevitch's work have moved me to grief about the way those policies have destroyed not just Iraqis but also American young people.

But responding to those large realities--the realities of our national policies, and the realities of what happened to those young reservists who are at the center of S.O.P. the book and S.O.P. the movie--is actually different from responding to the movie and the book as independent objects. The first is a large moral and sociopolitical enterprise; the second is the smaller enterprise of literary criticism. Earlier this week I could only respond to the information and insights that the auteur/authors have given us. Today I want to comment a little about the artistic endeavors.

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Though the tendency here at TPMCafe seems to be mega-posting (the danger of dragging New Yorker-habituated writers into on-line book clubs, I guess), I'm going to keep this brief, and mostly interrogatory, though I'd first like to commend Rory Stewart for noticing something vitally important about the origins of prison catastrophes. He wrote about what might be, in this book, and in this discussion, and in the broad debate about how to prevent other Abu Ghraibs, an over-emphasis on the importance of "well-drafted and well-disseminated regulations," and a concurrent slighting of the importance of employing prison directors who actually walk the prison and have their eyes open to the sort of activities that sensible regulations ban anyway. In my own personal prison, Ketziot, in Israel, the lieutenant colonel in command of my bloc left for home everyday at five p.m., leaving us in the charge of his lunatic deputy, whose behavior was actually constrained by his underlings, including yours truly, on those occasions when I mustered up the guts to call him out for his various idiocies. But this doesn't always happen, and so the most important variable in these sorts of prisons is the quality of the commander, not the stringency of the regulations.

In any case, an answer to one of Philip's questions, and then a question of my own. Philip asked, "Is my crime really lesser, is it somehow mitigated and is your outrage somehow mollified, if I appear to take no pleasure in it?"

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Hi -, greetings from Oxford at four-thirty in the morning. Apologies for being so late joining the discussion - and apologies if this is a little long (and effected by lack of sleep). I'd be very interested to hear what you all thought about Philip's question about the draft but I'm particularly responding here to Philip, Mary and Jeffrey's posts and the military and ideological background of the crimes.

I enjoyed the detail in each incident in the book: the glimpses into the MP's living space, the unexpected black humour, which made the atrocities more shocking and more comprehensible. Sometimes the laconic phrases such as 'Harman in a letter to her wife' or "Graner who has been a corrections officer' seemed almost deliberately tantalizing. I would have loved Philip to talk briefly about how Harman's sexuality was viewed within her unit or how it played into the pornographic staging of the photographs; or in Graner's case how he had treated prisoners when he was a corrections officer in the States. But I can see why Philip left those things aside.

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Here's a troubling question that hangs over the Abu Ghraib story: if you look happy when you torment your prisoners is it worse than if you look unhappy about it -- grim, or at least dour?

Appearances matter, for better or worse, and certainly, the more unseemly a criminal's demeanor the more easily and absolutely we revile his actions. The Book Club commenter who calls himself Munguza argues that much of the public outrage over the Abu Ghraib photographs was provoked by the fact that some of the soldiers in some of the pictures "apparently enjoyed brutally abusing Iraqi prisoners," and "indulged in deliberate, premeditated mistreatment as a form of entertainment."

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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."

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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.

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When Sy Hersh first told me about Abu Ghraib, I could not understand him, and not merely because he begins sentences in the middle of sentences. This was a problem of cognition. I had long ago built a template in my mind about these sorts of issues, and the story Sy was telling me did not fit.

This template was something I devised in the 1991, when I was a military policeman at the Ketziot Military Prison Camp in the Negev Desert of Israel. I had moved to Israel at the age of 20. I was drafted, and after many strange and discomfiting turns, I found myself in Ketziot, where I didn't want to be, for several reasons, including a) it's very hot in the Negev and I have the melanin of a Finn; b) I was raised as a socialist Zionist, which meant that I was a Jewish nationalist who opposed the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; c) the job itself, which was to maintain order in a prison holding 6,000 Palestinians, most of whom would kill me if given a chance. This is not to say that I wouldn't die for Israel. I just didn't want to die enforcing an occupation I thought morally and politically dubious.

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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?)

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As a memoirist, I'm constantly in the position of having to distrust images that come to me embedded with deep, almost unassailably powerful reservoirs of feeling. The sound bytes in which I like to remember myself in kidhood as a wise and noble girl thriving in Dickensian circumstances don't account for the kid I shot at with a bee bee gun or picketing my neighbors' house (It was a union town) so other kids wouldn't play with them.

Case in point: for twenty years I remembered my teen years as the time my beloved, oil worker daddy had bailed out on me, when, in fact--as I examined those easy memories--I was the one who left him. I stopped squirrel-hunting and bass fishing and started reading and ingesting pharmaceuticals and protesting the war he supported. He still showed up at my job as a night switchboard operator bringing a supper plate covered in foil. Yes, there was a sad chasm between us as he stepped up the process of drinking himself to death. But as it widened, he stood on his side of it looking mournfully after me--not the other way round. I was trying to escape the Tropic of Squalor we were living in.

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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!

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Philip Gourevitch will be joining us this week at TPMCafe Book Club to talk about his new book: Standard Operating Procedure. His first post should be up this morning.

Joining him will be poet and essayist Mary Karr, author Rory Stewart, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, E.J. Graff, senior correspondent at The American Prospect and novelist Robert Stone.