This weekend, instead of leaving my frigid, unheated house to go party somewhere warm, E and I decided to stay in and watch Errol Morris’ documentary, Standard Operating Procedure. Cheery, right? Now when the photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib surfaced, I tried to avoid looking at them as much as possible, because I am a sheltered weenie. I also didn’t think I needed to see the photos – I wasn’t the one who needed convincing, see, since I was against the war from the very outset.
Looking back on it, I do think these photos will stand as the most important images of this decade. The black bags over the faces of limp prisoners, stacked in a human pyramid – this is the visual representation of the loss of the last vestiges of U.S. moral authority. The easy rebuttal to the assertion that this government does not torture.
This administration and its cheerleaders (the nineteen percenters) will say that Abu Ghraib was the result of a few bad apples ruining the good name of the American system, that these actions started and ended with a couple of stupid kids who got carried away disobeyed orders. In fact, as Errol Morris uncovers in his documentary, these were the marching orders. The refrain, repeated again and again during the interviews, is that they were told “Do everything short of killing them,” and that’s what was done. One of the convicted MPs, Javal Davis, passionately argues that what was depicted in the photos was not torture – the real torture was going on behind the scenes, where people died at the hands of interrogators from shadowy “other governmental agencies.”
I definitely disagree with him; what these MPs did would constitute torture and I think most of them did deserve to serve some time for their actions. But as Morris points out, no one above the rank of staff sergeant served any time at all for their complicity in the actions that obliterated what was left of America’s reputation. And the photos that damned the MPs didn’t even show the worst of the torture, committed behind the scenes by their superiors and far away from the view of a camera lens. Why did our collective public anger and interest in hanging those responsible out to dry – why did it end with just these soldiers?
One thing that I found pretty fascinating about the documentary was how prominently military women were involved in the scandal. Lynndie England was probably the most public face attached to Abu Ghraib, and the documentary gives a little bit of a glimpse into the gender pressures of being a woman trying to succeed in a testosterone-driven environment. In some sense, maybe having the female MPs involved legitimized what they were doing. Or maybe the women were easier to scapegoat, like fired Brigadier General Janis Karpinski.
Then there is the brilliant smile of Sabrina Harman. It doesn’t get much time in the documentary, but Morris has a long blog post on the New York Times about Harman and the smile in in particular. One photo features this absolutely bizarre juxtaposition of her vivid smile and thumbs up pose next to the brutalized, decaying corpse of al-Jamadi. Harman explains that she knows it looks bad, but that she simply just doesn’t know what to do with her hands in photos. So she just kind of reflexively does the smile and thumbs up thing in every photo. And indeed, she really does do that pose in every photo.
If it weren’t for the photos, nobody would know anything about this. Perhaps that’s why they took them. Harman claims she was trying to provide evidence to exonerate her later, though her presence in the photos – and that smile – were what led to her conviction and incarceration. But why did Charles Graner insist on taking photographs also, since he was higher up on the chain of command and would almost certainly be damned? Was it purely out of a stupid sense of vanity or invincibility, or what? Morris wasn’t able to interview Graner for this documentary, since he is still incarcerated and the military did not allow Morris access.
Did they know what they were doing was wrong? Harman obviously knew, as she wrote constant letters to her wife complaining of the treatment of the prisoners (another interesting thing, what is it like to be a lesbian in the military?). Javal Davis didn’t seem to think so. It was standard operating procedure, modeled for them by other interrogators who differed in that they were more discreet about their actions. Lynndie England seemed to be more preoccupied with Graner’s romantic betrayal. And Graner himself, according to the testimony of the others, sadistically relished abusing prisoners. But of course, all of them must have known that this was wrong or illegal on some level, because they would change things in anticipation of Red Cross visits. After the audits, it was back to the standard operating procedures.
Abu Ghraib, I think, is the gruesome 21st century version of the Milgram experiment. You are an untrained soldier in charge of a prison, where the prisoners and even some of the fellow guards could be conspiring against you. The prison is constantly being shelled from the outside and you have friends who have been killed in these explosions. Oh yeah, and you’re nineteen, maybe twenty years old?
Now in comes an authority figure, a military guy with a title much higher than yours maybe, or someone from some other agency that you know is above you. You see this authority figure do weird things to the prisoners, things you are not sure are right. But you see this happen regularly, and you start getting orders to do this to your prisoners (who, again, are trying to kill you).
I think a lot of people would love to think that they would be a hero in this situation, myself included. You would disobey the orders, even if that meant going to prison or other military retribution. I don’t think that military culture allows for much of that, however. If you’re a good soldier, you’re trained to listen to your superior officer, and if you’re not the type of person who does that, you don’t last very long. Even the whistleblower MP wanted to keep the report within the military, and not expose it to the media or the external civilian world.
In some ways taking photographs was the best form of civil disobedience in this situation. If the MPs had simply walked out, got thrown in jail and blabbed about the goings on at Abu Ghraib to everyone who would listen to them, I’m not sure people would believe them. But you just can’t argue with the photographs.
We need to see these things. Just like we need to see the images of concentration camps, see the piles of skulls in the Killing Fields. Otherwise our sense of outrage is muted by complacency. With a thumbs up and a smile.
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