A hooded inmate balancing on a crate with electrical wires dangling from his hands; a pyramid of naked Iraqis with sandbags over their heads; male detainees forced to masturbate in front of female guards. When the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, were published in 2004, it was felt they told the whole story. That the soldiers photographed themselves posing gleefully while committing these outrages compounded their horror.
A photograph, goes the cliche, does not lie. But in Standard Operating Procedure, Philip Gourevitch argues that the images are deceptive when viewed out of context. 'I wanted to get beyond the frame that the photos impose,' says Gourevitch, 46, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of an acclaimed book on 1994's Rwandan genocide. 'This book is an attempt to say that you need to know a very, very, very great deal more in order to understand what you're seeing.'
The book is based on extensive interviews with the American participants in the Abu Ghraib scandal conducted by Gourevitch's friend, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, for the film Standard Operating Procedure. Morris, whose credits include The Thin Blue Line and Mr Death, approached Gourevitch after conducting a year of interviews and realising he had far more material than he could use in a film. Gourevitch sat in on the remaining half of the interviews and worked from transcripts that totalled 2.5 million words.
The film is powerful but needlessly stylised, Morris using actors to recreate the scenes of the photographs. Gourevitch's prose, by contrast, is spare and unemotional, letting the voices of the soldiers dominate. 'I wanted not to get between the reader and the material,' he says. 'I didn't feel the need to supply outrage or judgments all the time.'
The Bush administration portrayed the Abu Ghraib fiasco as the misconduct of aberrant rogues, or 'seven bad apples', rather than a result of American policy. But Gourevitch shows how, by eroding the applicability of the Geneva Convention, it created the legal vacuum that facilitated the abuses. The low-ranking soldiers were ill-trained, with few resources, and instructed by their superiors that brutal torture was standard operating procedure.
'These young volunteer men and women walked into the prison and found themselves put in a position that was completely untenable, with a corrupt and largely illegal policy in place,' he says. 'They were made into instruments of a great injustice. They were then subsequently subjected to a great injustice when they were made into scapegoats.'
Gourevitch chose not to travel to Iraq, given the dangers. 'By the time that I got involved,' he says, 'Abu Ghraib prison had been shut down. The story as I saw it existed entirely in the voices of these soldiers, who are now all home.'
