Picture Window On Shame

The Age

Saturday June 28, 2008

Michael Gawenda

Standard Operating Procedure: Inside Abu Ghraib

By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

Picador, $32.95

An examination of the horrors of Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison is turned into a meditation on truth and reality by not utilising the ghastly pictures that inspired it, writes Michael Gawenda.

THERE ARE NO photographs. At first, this is a baffling omission in a book that is ostensibly about a bunch of photographs, published in The New Yorker magazine and shown on the NBC network's 60Minutes program in April 2004, of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The photographs horrified Americans and people around the world and instantly became a searing metaphor for the disasters of the Iraq war.

This book with no photographs is a collaboration between the writer Philip Gourevitch and the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris whose film, Standard Operating Procedure, has been widely praised by critics in the US and Europe.

Gourevitch is a staff writer with The New Yorker and author of the unforgettable book on the genocide in Rwanda, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Morris' film The Fog of War, an extended interview with Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary who was one of the leading players in the Vietnam War, won an Academy Award.

It is not clear from the book whether Gourevitch conducted any of the interviews used in the book or whether he relied on the hundreds of hours of interviews by Morris that formed the basis of his film on Abu Ghraib. But it is clear to anyone who knows Gourevitch's writing that this is his book.

The decision not to publish the abuse photographs was probably Gourevitch's and is, paradoxically, one of the key reasons why this is such a great book, among the best books written about the Iraq venture.

On one level, it is not a book about the Iraq war at all. It does not examine the decision to go to war, the role of senior Bush Administration officials in that decision, the way they used faulty intelligence to make the case for war or even the catastrophically flawed postwar US-led occupation of the country.

Nor does the book examine in any detail the panicked and morally flawed response of George Bush and his senior officials to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the aftermath, the Administration quickly decided that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to prisoners taken in the War on Terror and that interrogation techniques banned under the US Military Code would be unbanned and that torture would be more or less defined out of existence.

There are other books, lots of them and most of them are first-rate, that examine all this. Standard Operating Procedure focuses in large part on how it came to be that the abuse photographs at Abu Ghraib were taken in those few weeks towards the end of 2003, on who took them and why. It examines the context in which they were taken, who knew about them and, above all, whether the photographs were an accurate portrayal of the truth of what happened at Abu Ghraib.

The book is a meditation on truth and reality, on what is hidden and revealed in photographs, on how reality can be distorted by pictures, and yet how, without pictures, without these photographs, what happened in the prison of Abu Ghraib in the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq would perhaps have rated no more than a footnote in the reporting of the war.

As if to make this point, the book starts with Saddam Hussein's release in October 2002 of most of the inmates of Abu Ghraib, the most notorious of the prisons during the rule of Saddam - these "factories of terror and annihilation" in the words of Gourevitch, in which tens of thousands of Iraqis were incarcerated and in which many were subjected to torture with no limits, torture that made death the thing the tortured most fervently wished for.

There are no photographs from these Saddam-era prisons, no photographs of the torture and death of thousands at Abu Ghraib during this time.

As a result, Abu Ghraib will be remembered as America's great shame basically because there are these photographs of abuse, shocking photographs, taken mostly by the men and women who were the abusers, young, ill-trained, confused and confounded by the conflicting orders given them about the Geneva Conventions and interrogation limits, totally unprepared for the task given them - to look after thousands of Iraqis detained after the invasion, the vast majority of them guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Abu Ghraib, by the time the Americans invaded, consisted of little more than vermin-infested, ruined buildings. There had been no planning for what to do with detainees and prisoners and Abu Ghraib became the country's largest prison basically because there were no alternatives. Nightly mortar and grenade attacks terrified not just the American military police units who ran the prison, but the Iraqi detainees, many of whom were housed in tents and unfortified buildings.

It is this nightmare world, this world of no moral or ethical clarity, this world for which neither Bush nor any of his senior officials nor any general or senior military officer held themselves, or were held, responsible for creating, that this book so brilliantly conveys.

And in that world the photographs - of the naked human pyramid of Iraqi men composed for his camera by Corporal Charles Graner, the naked Iraqi being led on a leash by Graner's lover Lynndie England, the peak-hooded Iraqi standing on a box wearing a sort of poncho, hooked up to wires, his arms outstretched as if he is being crucified - are given context and complex meaning.

The power of the writing affirms the limits of images and photographs as a means of truth-telling. And the stories, mostly mundane and banal but nevertheless horrifying, of the abusers and the onlookers and the arse-coverers, become illustrations of what the great Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

What the perpetrators of the abuse at Abu Ghraib lacked above all else was moral clarity, a sense of what is right and what is wrong.

The culpability of their superiors, none of whom were charged with any offences - unlike Graner and England and a half-dozen other abusers who were charged and convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 10 years to six months - was far from banal. Arendt was only partly right: not all evil is banal.

In the end, the book convincingly shows that the photographs were mostly staged and therefore the reality of what was being photographed was not as brutal as the pictures suggested.

It's what the photographs do not show, what was not photographed, the beating to death of a prisoner interrogated by CIA agents, the regular beatings of prisoners by the military police guards, the sexual humiliation of prisoners, most of them innocent of any crime, the shackling of prisoners for hours on end in stress positions, that's

what this book makes so hauntingly real.

The irony is that without the photographs, this book - in which there are no photographs - would never have been written.

Phillip Gourevitch will be a guest at next month's Melbourne Writers' Festival. There is an extract from Standard Operating Procedure in Insight today.

Michael Gawenda is a former Age Washington correspondent and the director of Melbourne University's Centre for Advanced Journalism.

© 2008 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home