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Standard Operating Procedure is a war story that takes its place among the classics. It is the story of American soldiers who were sent to Iraq as liberators only to find themselves working as jailers in Saddam Hussein's old dungeons, responsible for implementing the sort of policy they were supposed to be fighting against. It is the story of a defining moment in the war, and a defining moment in our understanding of ourselves — the story of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoner abuse, as seen through the eyes, and told through the voices, of the soldiers who took them and appeared in them. It is the story of how those soldiers were at once the instruments of a great injustice and the victims of a great injustice.
In a tradition of moral and political reckoning, and all-powerful story-telling, that runs from Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor to Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising and perceptive account of the front lines of the war on terror. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris's startlingly frank and intimate interviews with the soldier — photographers who gave us what have become the iconic images of the Iraq war, Standard Operating Procedure is a book that makes you see, and makes you feel, and above all makes you think about what it means to be human. It is an utterly original book that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines — a work of searing power from two of our finest masters of nonfiction, working at the peak of their powers.
Review:
Even before the U.S. government seized control of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the correctional facility 20 miles from Baghdad had been a factory of torture and annihilation. Under Saddam Hussein's demented administration, the prison was a death house where beatings and hangings were commonplace. Constructed in the mid-'60s by British engineers with American blueprints, the campus-like penal colony was... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) where Saddam denied human rights with the sadistic flare of Goebbels. Prisoners were subjected to dungeons, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and castration. Arms and hands were chopped off as punishment. Saddam's son, Qusay, acting as chief of the secret police, is said to have ordered mass executions for his own carnival-like amusement. But in October 2002 the reign of terror at Abu Ghraib abruptly ended. President George W. Bush, brimming with post-9/11 indignation and hubris, threatened to go to war with Iraq, convinced by intelligence reports that Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction. The mere threat of U.S. intervention had a salubrious effect at Abu Ghraib: Nearly 10,000 Iraqis descended on the penal camp as if storming the Bastille. Saddam quickly ordered all prisoners released, realizing he couldn't afford widespread anarchy while warring with the Great Satan. Oddly, the fleeing convicts, instead of indulging in pro-American chants, shouted, "Our blood, our souls, we'll sacrifice for you, oh Saddam." The mass release of Saddam's prisoners is where Philip Gourevitch (editor of the Paris Review and longtime staff writer for the New Yorker) and Errol Morris (Academy Award-winning director of "The Fog of War") begin "Standard Operating Procedure," their deeply haunting and brilliantly researched saga of good intentions gone awry. Their project started with Morris interviewing participants in the Abu Ghraib saga for a documentary film, also called "Standard Operating Procedure," which came out earlier this year. Gourevitch then drew on more than 200 hours of Morris' interviews to write the book. Beginning with the back story of how the U.S. government sent two former directors of the Utah Department of Corrections to establish new prisons in Iraq following Operation Iraqi Freedom, Gourevitch — with stylistic echoes of Norman Mailer's nonfiction novels on Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald — coolly recounts how America suddenly found itself repopulating Saddam's old dungeons. Writing with a spooky combination of mature historical reflection and a cinematic sense of doom, he amplifies the pioneering reporting of the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and CBS's "60 Minutes," which broke the Abu Ghraib story almost simultaneously in 2004. Even though Abu Ghraib had a god-awful reputation during the Saddam years, the U.S. government, unwilling to wait two years to rebuild a new prison, gave the cursed facility a face-lift and went into the incarceration business. The huge Saddam portrait was replaced by a banner in both English and Arabic that read: "America is the friend of all Iraqi people." Everybody from Ambassador Paul Bremer to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz failed to understand the atrocious symbolism of Abu Ghraib. They scoffed at officials from Amnesty International and the United Nations who wanted the detention center closed. The absence of an Iraqi government had turned U.S. policymakers into daredevil narcissists, gloating over the fact that Saddam's palace on the Tigris River had become an American garrison. Meanwhile, workers were ordered to speed up the remodeling of Abu Ghraib, and a huge new tented compound named Camp Ganci (named after a New York firefighter killed on 9/11) was erected on Abu Ghraib's grounds. American troops started picking up prisoners in sweeps, and they needed somewhere to put them. The Bush administration's sanctioned interrogations about the al-Qaeda menace were underway. Ignoring concerns that the United States wasn't adhering to the Geneva Conventions, Vice President Cheney told NBC's Tim Russert that America sometimes had to work "the dark side." Overseeing this anti-Geneva Conventions attitude was then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, made an outstanding documentary in 2007, titled "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which strongly suggests that officials well up the chain of command had approved the rough hazing of prisoners. Although Gourevitch and Morris don't focus on Rumsfeld, his indifference to Iraqi culture — and his inability to shift gears after the U.S. invasion to keeping order and halting a budding insurgency — hover over the events in this book; bad things happened on his watch. Anybody looking for a red-white-and-blue "Band of Brothers" lift should not read this book. There isn't a single old-timey patriotic page in "Standard Operating Procedure." Members of the Army's 372nd Military Police Company started engaging in jailhouse humiliations at Abu Ghraib, acting without conscience. Inmates were hooded and stripped, forced into sexual acts, repeatedly kicked in the groin. Ferocious dogs barked at them from only one or two feet away, a "black blur of muscle and jaw," in Gourevitch's words. Compounding the tales of horror in "Standard Operating Procedure," the U.S. military ultimately found that three out of four Abu Ghraib prisoners had not committed any crime. Even President Bush deemed the prison abuses unacceptable. Although much of "Standard Operating Procedure" is about the ghastly photographs taken at Abu Ghraib — who can forget the hooded prisoner balancing on top of a box with electrical wires connected to his outstretched arms? — there is not a single image in the book. While I think the lack of pictures was a publishing mistake, it's understandable why Gourevitch and Morris refrained from showing naked Iraqi prisoners being forced to form a flesh pyramid or Sgt. Ivan Fredrick sitting on a prisoner sandwiched between two stretchers. Would our understanding of Abu Ghraib really be enhanced by seeing soldiers Charles Graner and Lynndie England pointing fingers at naked Iraqis' penises? "The photographs have a place in the story," Gourevitch writes, "but they are not the story, and it would be untruthful here to submit once again to their frame." There are three or four extraordinary set pieces in "Standard Operating Procedure." Supreme among them is the story of Sgt. Ken Davis, an MP whose Christian idealism about helping Iraqis turned to hatred for Arabs after his convoy was blown up by an IED. Tasked with driving VIPs to the Baghdad airport and shuttling prisoners out of Abu Ghraib for court hearings, Davis tried to ingratiate himself with the Iraqi villagers by handing out candy and stuffed toys. But that roadside bomb turned him into a monster of rage. "I was in this black, black place," he said. "I wanted to kill. I wanted so bad to pay back." Sgt. Davis, instead of taking out his frustration on the Iraqi people, turned hostile toward Bush administration policies that placed U.S. soldiers in a "war zone that had been classified as mission accomplished." One afternoon, he watched in frustration as four Iraqi prisoners at Camp Ganci were killed in a riot because guards ran out of non-lethal rounds and opened up with live ammunition. That evening he called his father to say, "Dad, I can't take this. I can't take innocent lives being destroyed by American bullets. I can't do it." "Standard Operating Procedure" is a devastating critique of the Bush administration. It inspires outrage at everything and everyone from the Bush Doctrine to former attorney general Alberto Gonzales to the CIA. Yet, Gourevitch laments, "the stain is ours, because whatever else the Iraq War was about, it was always, above all, about America — about the projection of America's force and America's image into the world. Iraq was the stage, and Iraqis would suffer for that, enduring some fifty deaths for every American life lost: in this, and by every other measure of devastation, it was very much their war." Douglas Brinkley is professor of history and fellow at the Baker Institute at Rice University. His recent books include "The Great Deluge" and "The Reagan Diaries." Reviewed by Douglas Brinkley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)
Review:
"What Standard Operating Procedure, the book, does...with remarkable power, is conjure the atmosphere and conditions at Abu Ghraib that existed during the period in which the photographed abuses occurred." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Review:
"[Gourevitch]weaves Morris' interviews, court transcripts and journalists' accounts into a compelling story of a prison plan gone wrong." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"[O]ne of the most devastating of the many books on Iraq." Raymond Bonner, New York Times
Review:
"If you thought you heard the whole story of Abu Ghraib prison, think again. Here is the rest of the story." Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Synopsis:
An utterly original literary and intellectual collaboration by two of our keenest moral and political observers has produced a nonfiction Heart of Darkness for our time: the first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib prison, based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with the Americans involved. Standard Operating Procedure reveals the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the iconic photographs of the Iraq war-the haunting digital snapshots from Abu Ghraib prison that shocked the world-and simultaneously illuminates and alters forever our understanding of those images and the events they depict. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris's startlingly frank and intimate interviews with Americans who served at Abu Ghraib and with some of their Iraqi prisoners, as well as on his own research, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising account of Iraq's occupation from the inside out-rendering vivid portraits of guards and prisoners ensnared in an appalling breakdown of command authority and moral order. What did we think we saw in the infamous photographs, and what were we, in fact, looking at? What did the people in the photographs think they were doing, and why did they take them? What was standard operating procedure and what was being creative when it came to making prisoners uncomfortable? Who was giving orders, and who was following them? Where does the line lie between humiliation and torture, and why and how does that matter? Was the true Abu Ghraib scandal a result of an exposA1/2 or a cover-up? In exploring these questions, Gourevitch and Morris have crafted a nonfiction morality play that standsto endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines. By taking us deep into the voices and characters of the men and women who lived the horror of Abu Ghraib, the authors force us, whatever our politics, to reexamine the pat explanations in which we have been offered-or sought-refuge, and to see afresh this watershed episode. Instead of a few bad apples, we are confronted with disturbingly ordinary young American men and women who have been dropped into something out of Dante's Inferno. Standard Operating Procedure is a book that makes you think and makes you see-an essential contribution from two of our finest nonfiction artists working at the peak of their powers.
Philip Gourevitch is the award-winning author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.
Errol Morris is a world-renowned filmmaker — the Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War and the recipient of a MacArthur genius award. His other films include Mr. Death, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, A Brief History of Time, and The Thin Blue Line.
While the general public in this country is somewhat knowledgeable of the prolonged agonies of the ongoing Iraq War, few of us are as acutely aware of the dark cloud of atrocities accompanying that war. Information about the 'progress' and purpose of that war are parceled out by the somewhat restricted media, the more serious and sad aspects of what is actually happening are scrutinized before the media releases that information, leaving us with a generalized anxiety about conditions and prognostications of the conflict that has so little support from the public at present. Too often this 'protective shield' from the facts allows a certain degree of near complacency, and it takes the intermittent release of data such as the unveiling of the atrocities and prisoner abuse at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison that surfaced through blogs and magazines and newspapers to startle the public and remind us of the grim aspects that war can drive countries and individuals to perform. Yes, similar startle reaction accompanied the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and the books and films that followed that event alerted the public of the realities that can happen in wartime. But it takes an important book such as STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE written by Philip Gourevitch with invaluable insights and interviews from co-author Errol Morris who created the film STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE to bring to our careful scrutiny just what is happening and what is possible under the guise of 'protection' in time of war.
Gourevitch wisely divides this book into three sections - 'Before', 'During' and 'After; - which allows the reader to absorb the events leading up to the creation of the Abu Ghraib prison, introducing the people involved in transforming this dank and pungent edifice housing Saddam Hussein's own grim prison and execution house into a 'redesigned' American prison. We meet the contractors, the military personnel from the officers down to the soldiers assigned to guard the detainee prisoners, to the prisoners themselves, and it is this thorough approach to reportage that engenders confidence in the writing and makes every riveting page of this immensely important and terrifying account sear the reader's eye. Photographs, such as those that flooded the blogsites and media for a brief moment a few years ago, can create a visceral impression, but Gourevitch's choice to exclude the visuals from his evaluation of Abu Ghraib and the inhumane atrocities perpetrated by our own soldiers on the prisoners makes his book even more disturbing.
The use of letters home by the soldiers witnessing and taking part in the torture and 'interrogation techniques', letters and interviews supplied by Errol Morris from his research for his documentary film, allow us to hear about the situation first hand. Gourevitch is careful not to press his thumb on the scales that weigh the balance of 'indicated' and 'not indicated' actions and his doing so makes the reading all the more vivid. He allows us to observe how the situation arose, what actually happened there, and the repercussions and cover-up of the full story once the activities within the walls of that now infamous prison leaked out. This is a book that should be read by all citizens of this country (and of all countries who engage in war) to remind us all just how distorted and tested the state of humanity can become when the umbrella of 'war' alters human behavior that at times only retrospection (such as this book supplies) unveils. STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE is an important document and a fascinating, if grim, read. Highly Recommended.
Grady Harp
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lindsey beadle, September 3, 2008 (view all comments by lindsey beadle)
I almost couldn't put this down. This is a great account from the people who were there, not an analysis from above. Mr. Gourevitch is a great writer. I wish all nonfiction read like this.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No (9 of 13 readers found this comment helpful)
"Review"
by Michiko Kakutani, New York Times,
"What Standard Operating Procedure, the book, does...with remarkable power, is conjure the atmosphere and conditions at Abu Ghraib that existed during the period in which the photographed abuses occurred."
"Review"
by Los Angeles Times,
"[Gourevitch]weaves Morris' interviews, court transcripts and journalists' accounts into a compelling story of a prison plan gone wrong."
"Review"
by Raymond Bonner, New York Times,
"[O]ne of the most devastating of the many books on Iraq."
"Review"
by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
"If you thought you heard the whole story of Abu Ghraib prison, think again. Here is the rest of the story."
"Synopsis"
by Ingram,
An utterly original literary and intellectual collaboration by two of our keenest moral and political observers has produced a nonfiction Heart of Darkness for our time: the first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib prison, based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with the Americans involved. Standard Operating Procedure reveals the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the iconic photographs of the Iraq war-the haunting digital snapshots from Abu Ghraib prison that shocked the world-and simultaneously illuminates and alters forever our understanding of those images and the events they depict. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris's startlingly frank and intimate interviews with Americans who served at Abu Ghraib and with some of their Iraqi prisoners, as well as on his own research, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising account of Iraq's occupation from the inside out-rendering vivid portraits of guards and prisoners ensnared in an appalling breakdown of command authority and moral order. What did we think we saw in the infamous photographs, and what were we, in fact, looking at? What did the people in the photographs think they were doing, and why did they take them? What was standard operating procedure and what was being creative when it came to making prisoners uncomfortable? Who was giving orders, and who was following them? Where does the line lie between humiliation and torture, and why and how does that matter? Was the true Abu Ghraib scandal a result of an exposA1/2 or a cover-up? In exploring these questions, Gourevitch and Morris have crafted a nonfiction morality play that standsto endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines. By taking us deep into the voices and characters of the men and women who lived the horror of Abu Ghraib, the authors force us, whatever our politics, to reexamine the pat explanations in which we have been offered-or sought-refuge, and to see afresh this watershed episode. Instead of a few bad apples, we are confronted with disturbingly ordinary young American men and women who have been dropped into something out of Dante's Inferno. Standard Operating Procedure is a book that makes you think and makes you see-an essential contribution from two of our finest nonfiction artists working at the peak of their powers.
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