Recalling the Shame of Abu Ghraib

Harman with a dead Iraqi prisoner packed in ice.

Philip Gourevitch.

The horror of the photographs of the abuse at Abu Ghraib wasn't as much the nudity or the stress positions inflicted on the Iraqi prisoners; rather, it was the smiling faces of the American soldiers who were calling the shots and clicking the shutters. Yet the photos themselves tell only a small part of the story. Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker staff writer, and Errol Morris, a filmmaker, have synthesized those images and the larger issues of prisoner treatment in their new book Standard Operating Procedure, a companion book to a film with the same name. Gourevitch says that the events are still widely misconstrued as the work of rogue soldiers, rather than the culmination of policies encouraged through the chain of command. He spoke with U.S. News about the new book. Excerpts:

How has our understanding of Abu Ghraib changed?
To say that it stemmed from policy i s never a very partisan opinion; the Economist magazine, a week after the images came out, put the picture of the hooded Iraqi man on the front cover and ran a headline that said "Rumsfeld Resign." There was a clear understanding at the time of what was going on—that it was a matter of policy. And then it changed. There was a sense that the pictures themselves were the offense, not what they depicted. There was a new sense that the soldiers who appeared in the photos were the extent of it, that they were rogue soldiers who were just allowed to do this night, after night, after night, after night.... It struck me that this was a story that told what it was like for men and women to be in that cold, claustrophobic place.... There's a much larger story than what you see in those snapshots.

How have Americans dealt with those pictures?
Oddly, the pictures have offered a way for an exposé. They were embarrassing to us and to our military. There's a pretty strong sense that no one knows what this war was about. So many reasons were given, and none have really held up. But at some level we all know that the war in Iraq and the war on terror are about America's image in the world, America's idea of itself, the way we project force, and our values and ideas. Seeing these pictures, most of us cringed. And yet the pictures presented a handy way to bracket the issue. To say that it's just the pictures, not the thing that's being pictured—that it was only these perverse, depraved soldiers, who went amok. But these were the rules, not the exception.

If these pictures had been taken by photojournalists, they would have been an extraordinary scoop. Instead, because of who took them, the pictures became something quite different than that. But when you look beyond the frame of those photos, when one hears the voices of the soldiers, it is clear that so many things were out of line at Abu Ghraib.

Such as?
The prison itself was illegally placed inside a combat zone under constant mortar fire. It was a place where as many as 9,000 Iraqis were held without charges, having been rounded up in sweeps, without legal recourse, without a system for release, in virtually secret and indefinite detention. There was a complete breakdown that then, in this particular cellblock where the high-value detainees were kept, came together with a new set of rules, which was to allow the use of dogs, sleep deprivation, nudity, sensory deprivation, to break the resistance of suspected terrorists or insurgents. (And I stress the word "suspected.") And these new rules were put in place and they counted on these military police, who weren't even trained as military police, to carry them out.

What was the breakdown?
In a well-disciplined army, there shouldn't have been room for excess. Armies work by sending out young men and women to create controlled violence—and the control is crucial. Here, you had the opposite. It wasn't just that you had a lack of discipline; it's that there was permission. Many people say that these soldiers were out of line. They say, "Show me a policy that said that soldiers were told to strip prisoners naked and put them in a pyramid." That might be true, but you can see in the policies that no one had a problem with prisoners being handcuffed and chained to a cell door. All the rules that came from the Pentagon all the way down to the military intelligence operation running that cellblock created license and permission to go to far greater extremes in the abuse and mistreatment of prisoners than had ever been allowed before.

Yet some soldiers took the pictures to document the events.
Sabrina Harmon, who took a lot of the iconic photographs, started taking photos just of prisoners as snapshots. Pictures of prisoners standing, in extremely uncomfortable stress positions, with panties on their heads—and they have much more of a photojournalistic quality. In her interview, the phrase that keeps coming up is "I just wanted to show what was allowed." She said that she wouldn't have believed these things unless someone had the pictures to prove it, so she started taking pictures to have some sort of proof. And yes, in time these pictures became something of a game—people would show pictures of what was going on to their higher-ups and say: "Is this OK? Should we be allowed to do this?" They were told, "Go ahead."

Is this the result of the fact that nearly every soldier has a digital camera?
I don't think this is how we ran prisons in the past. When the Bush administration said "the gloves are coming off," that means that the gloves were once on. When prison guards look at those pictures, they don't say, "Yeah, that's what we did in all the other wars, except we didn't take pictures of it."

People compare Abu Ghraib to Haditha, where it was indeed a group of rogue soldiers. At Abu Ghraib, it was policy to detain people and to treat them this way. It was seen by the Red Cross and vigorously protested at the time. We have that on paper. Yet, they complained to the higher-ups, who were the very people who'd put the rules in place in the first place, so they ignored the complaints and covered it up.

Surely indignities happen in all wars.
Have there always been bad things that happen in war? Yes, war is very ugly. But you have to distinguish what has become aberrant in war and what has become deliberate and intentional. And what has, in the aftermath of these photos, been presented as our policy rather than been retreated from as our shame.

What's striking is that these soldiers were caught in the middle of that. They were asked to do it. They felt that they were encouraged and rewarded for it. And yet at the same time, they thought it was bizarre and took pictures of it. Documenting it, in some ways, could be considered a public service and yet, it was the only crime that was punished—taking or appearing in photographs. That should be a matter of some alarm to us.

How come there wasn't greater push-back from the Army for more punishment?
The instinctive response of bureaucracies is to cover things up. No one wanted any trouble. It wasn't just that no one above sergeant was in trouble; no one but reservists was ever put on trial. Lt. Gen. Richardo Sanchez, who now paints himself as a victim, signed the orders. It's hard to be the victim of orders that you yourself signed. When Sanchez ordered the investigation in 2004, he limited it to just the MP brigade, not the whole operation at the prison. Later, there was a look higher up the chain. So, you have something like a dozen investigations creating a mosaic in which it was very difficult to see the whole picture. And back in Washington, one party was in control, and there was no serious look at what policies caused the situation to occur.

Lastly, it's been the American public who've not been particularly engaged in this. There's a wish that it would go away, a wish to treat it as aberrant. Then there are some elements who say, "They blew up our buildings, let's get 'em." The soldiers say this, too. That's why it's illegal to have a prison in the middle of a combat zone. Why? Because if you are under fire and someone brings in a captured insurgent who's just been shooting at you, it's a lot different than if you are far beyond the lines and out of trouble. It gets personal, and it got personal.

What images shock you the most?
The really important photos to me are not the ones that you would expect. They are the pictures of men, naked and chained to beds for hours, with hoods over their heads. Those were the pictures that were way out of line with what was considered acceptable. No one's ever been prosecuted for photos in which soldiers didn't appear. But we should not get distracted from the fact that all of this happened in a place where America had chosen to project its force and to confront its enemies. This is not a partisan problem; it's a problem of how the country feels about itself.

Tocqueville famously examined prisons to get a better sense of how the society felt about itself. During the revolution, George Washington decided that, unlike the British Army, we would not kill prisoners of war. He unilaterally decided that this was not how he wanted to project the image of a country fighting against tyrants. And that image helped us tremendously to have authority in the world and served to attract people who are fleeing such regimes. So when we look at the legacy of these photos, that's what they served to undo.

Is it too soon to have this debate?
No, it's not too soon because it is still happening. I don't think it's too soon to confront something that is of pressing national urgency. These soldiers were acting in our names, and our names are at stake. I don't think that it's ever too soon to realize that. It is revealing that in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, we had a debate about whether to legalize waterboarding. That the only person in authority who had ever been tortured, John McCain, as a result of party-line politics, ended up voting for it. That is totally incomparable with past defenses. In the past, abuse was seen as something that was done, possibly with the best national security interests in mind, but that were still crimes. Here, we've decided that in the wake of that shame, this is what we should do. Is that who we want to be? I'd hope that that is the debate we could one day have.

Last question : There's been some discussion that Mr. Morris paid for some of the interviews used in the movie and in your book. Any comment?
I would never pay for interviews in my print life. It's just not done, and I've never done it. It's never come up in my work. But it has become standard procedure in documentary filmmaking, increasingly. It hasn't in any way affected the material itself. As a journalist, my job is to ascertain the veracity of the information and assess the stakes that people bring to the table. I can tell you that the difference between the paid and the unpaid interviews is immeasurable.