REPORTAGE:DRAWING UPON 18 months of conversations with his collaborator, film-maker Errol Morris, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews for his motion picture of the same title, Philip Gourevitch's Standard Operating Procedures is a compelling and damning deconstruction of the story behind the infamous photographs that emerged in April 2004, depicting US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners - naked, hooded, shackled, beaten up, forced to masturbate, and terrorised by dogs - at Abu Ghraib prison.
As Gourevitch reminds us, the story of how the US walked away from the Third Geneva Convention's requirement that prisoners of war "be entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honour" actually began just days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, as evidenced by a series of secret memoranda, overseen by Vice-President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, which asserted extraordinary powers for the US president in wartime, including the authority to sanction torture.
In the months that followed, President Bush issued various orders enabling him to intern any foreign citizen, anywhere, on suspicion of involvement in international terrorism, and denying the protection of the Geneva Conventions to POWs in Afghanistan. A further memo in 2002, from assistant attorney-general Jay Bybee, argued that many "cruel, inhuman or degrading" interrogation practices do "not rise to the level of torture", clearing the way for the use of stress positions, removal of clothing, 20-hour interrogations and the use of dogs to induce phobia at the American Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba.
Exactly which interrogation techniques were considered permissible was never clear at Abu Ghraib, where five different versions of interrogation rules were circulated during October 2003; nor were written regulations ever posted on the Military Intelligence (MI) Tier 1A singular-occupancy hard-cell block, where the photographed abuse of the so-called "high value MI prisoners" took place. As Megan Ambuhl, one of the seven court- martialled night-shift Military Police (MPs), observed: "They couldn't say we broke the rules because there were no rules."
As it happened, Ambuhl and the other guards on Tier 1A were all combat MPs, trained to support frontline forces, as opposed to internment MPs who are trained to run prisons. Compounding their inexperience was the fact that Abu Ghraib MPs were expected to soften up prisoners prior to their questioning by MI interrogators, both soldiers and civilians, who were essentially their superiors on the cell block, yet outside the military chain of command.
Conditions at Abu Ghraib, situated in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, deteriorated that autumn as the prison repeatedly came under intensive mortar fire at night. Inexperienced, under-trained, under attack and under orders, the night-shift MPs, according to Gourevitch, knew that what they were witnessing, being asked to do, or on occasion chose to do, was immoral if not illegal, and that all soldiers had a duty to report same. Yet Cpl Charles Graner, who both took and featured in many of the photographs of abuse, claimed that when he early on queried his platoon leader, Capt Christopher Brinson, about what he knew were ethically wrong practices, he was told that "our mission is to support MI".
GOUREVITCH EMPLOYS THE same formidable, post-facto forensic skills of his acclaimed Rwanda genocide study, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, to demolish the Bush administration's claim that the brutality and torture at Abu Ghraib - whatever about the murder of the prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi - was the work of a few isolated, morally deficient, low-ranking soldiers. Lt Col Steven Jordan, the ranking MI officer at the prison, and Chief Warrant Officer Ed Rivas were regular visitors to Tier 1A, as were JAG officers (members of the prison's legal team), and Cpl Graner had shown several pictures of naked, trussed, panty-hooded prisoners to at least three of his superior officers with no consequences. Yet when the International Red Cross (ICRC), following its visitations to Tier IA, issued a report in November 2003 that the alleged ill-treatment of prisoners was "tantamount to torture", the senior army command at Abu Ghraib dismissed the ICRC's findings as a misguided and hostile fantasy.
Sabrina Harmon, a Specialist in the Military Police who chose to document the abuse with her camera rather than refuse orders or report it, wrote home that October to her partner, Kelly: "Not many people know this shit goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove the US is not what they think." However, it was not until mid-January of 2004, when Specialist MP Joe Darby handed in a CD of Cpl Graner's pictures to an agent of the Army's Criminal Investigative Division (CID) - himself a regular visitor to Tier 1A, along with other CID agents who saw and failed to object to much of what went on - that an investigation was launched into "reported incidents of detainee abuse".
An investigation which centred on the 800th MP brigade but entirely excluded Military Intelligence resembled, according to army public affairs officer Lieut Col Vic Harris, more of a containment exercise whose "only intent was to hide it and try to prevent the images from getting out to the media".
In late April 2004, however, a handful of Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on CBS television and published in the New Yorker. Seven of the night-shift MPs, including Graner, his girlfriend Pte Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman were subsequently court- martialled and sentenced, along with two army dog-handlers. Gen Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th MP Brigade, was reprimanded and busted to colonel. The only senior officer to be court-martialled was Lieut Col Jordan, the MI commander at Abu Ghraib, who was ultimately convicted of nothing.
WHAT IMPRESSES MOST in Gourevitch's brillant study is the manner in which he painstakingly establishes how the Abu Ghraib photographs have a place in - but by no means are - the entire story of what transpired at the prison. Indeed, he goes so far as to suggest that the pictures might have performed a profound public service had they not come to be seen, in our image-mediated world, as the story of the war itself. The problem with that reduction, however, is all that lies outside their frame: be it an estimated half-million or more Iraqi civilian dead, or the 4.4 million Iraqis forced to flee their homes.
Nor do the pictures reveal what Gourevitch scathingly, accurately, describes as "the complicity . . . the cover-up . . . the cowardice and incompetence infected every link in the chain of command that ran from the MI block to the Pentagon to the White House - a military bureaucracy that had been politically cowed and corrupted from the top down by civilian masters who had no experience of combat." Bush et al may have got away with Abu Ghraib, Gourevitch asserts, "but we can't". For the rest of the US, "the stain is inescapable and irreversible, and it is ours".
Boston-born Anthony Glavin is a novelist, short story writer, and critic
Standard Operating Procedures: A War Story By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris Picador, 286pp. £16.99