Last week Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) published a new report, Broken
Laws, Broken Lives, introduced by Major General Taguba who led the US Army’s official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and testified before congress in May 2004.  In his introduction to the report he commented that “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes”.  Last week I  went hear Philip Gourevitch talk about his new book, Standard Operating Procedure, which considers the cases of those who were responsible for maintaining order at the ‘hard site’ in Abu Ghraib. His previous books include We Wish to Inform you That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families- Stories From Rwanda, for which he received the Guardian First Book award.

Standard Operating Procedure is a collaboration with the filmmaker Errol Morris, who has since made a documentary from the  hundreds of hours of interviews with the military personnel who were posted at Abu Ghraib during Autumn 2003.  Many of them documented their lives at Abu Ghraib with cameras, inadvertently recording the mistreatment and torture of Iraqi prisoners.  Gourevitch became involved in the project when, half way through the process of filming interviews, Morris sent him the transcripts in which the military personnel described their activities at Abu Ghraib.  Gourevitch’s work mediates between the photographs (although not reproduced in the book) and the stories told by those who took them.

The images are striking because they are neither easy to decipher nor self-explanatory.   As the photos became publicly available, many journalists presented the pictures as the perverse work of a group of individuals caught up in their own love triangles or power games with their prisoners.  Last week, Gourevitch argued that this tabloid approach missed the real implications of the systemic breakdown in justice.  This echoed General Taguba’s comment that “our national honour is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors”.

By linking the images to the military personnel’s own accounts, he described the
breakdown in discipline which  extended beyond the isolated activities of one company.  George Packer, another American journalist has written that “The memos on torture and the Geneva Conventions written by the president’s counsel Alberto Gonzalez and others made abuses inevitable”. (1)  Gourevitch suggested that the importance of the
photos from Abu Ghraib lies in their documenting the link between CIA’s Counterterror chief Cofer Black’s comment that “After 9/11 the gloves came off” and the use of mistreatment, abuse, torture and policies such as extreme rendition.  The intentional use of the justice system to allow the mistreatment of prisoners demonstrated that the government was not oblivious to the activities of those working on their behalf.  Beyond the evidence of torture, the interviews told of prisoners who were held without charge and of the ‘ghost prisoners’ held by the CIA.

In George Packer’s book there is a comment from an Iraqi who describes the complete contrast between his treatment in military custody and in a military medical ward, underlining the complexities of this subject. Gourevitch’s exploration of what constituted ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ considered the events at Abu Ghraib important because they demonstrated the lack of stigma associated with torture and mistreatment, and the effects on captors as well as captives.  Indeed, last week he argued that a draft was the only way to ensure that the burden of military service fell evenly and equally across society. The PHR report documents the long term physically and psychologically harmful effects of the use of torture on individuals. In spite of the differing focus of these two most recent works, they are a forceful indictment of the culture of impunity maintained by the present administration.  Sophie

(1)Packer, George The Assassins’ Gate,  FSG 2005 p326

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