On my way to WAM this last weekend I ate french fries and caught up on my New Yorkers. One article, in particular, really struck me and I wanted to write a bit about it here: "Exposure: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib" by Philip Gourevitch (of the amazing book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families) and Errol Morris (one of my favorite documentary filmmakers.
In it, they look closely at the life of Sabrina Harman, the young soldier who took the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that have come to haunt us. The piece is so powerful, in part because the authors rely heavily on quotations from those involved, particularly Hartman. Unlike most New Yorker pieces, which I find sometimes err on missing the voices of those at the center of the issue, this one is full of organic wanderings by the soldiers who got caught up in that horrendous place and time.
What becomes clear very quickly is that Harman used her camera as a way to process the dissonance between what she felt was right--a small but nagging sentiment--and what she was watching happen all around her to the point of normalization. The lens becomes her way of organizing the world, of making sense of the nonsensical. Interestingly, she is known as the one who won't even let people kill a bug, but she never speaks out directly about the abuse being heaped on detainees. Clearly this contrast tells us something even more frightening about the power of conditioning. She wasn't seeing bugs tortured day in and day out. She was seeing people endure that to the point that it no longer seemed like something to endure or end.
They write of her: "Nobody called Sabrina Harman Mother Theresa at the Abu Ghraib hard site. But even on the Military Intelligence block she retained her reputation as the blithe spirit of the unit, obviously not the leader and yet never a true follower, either--more like a tagalong, the soldier who should never have been a soldier."
Harman writes in a letter home: "They've been stripping 'the fucked up' prisoners and handcuffing them to the bars. Its pretty sad. I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. I kind of feel bad for these guys, even if they are accused of killing US soldiers. We degrade them but we don't hit and thats a plus even though Im sure they wish we'd kill them."
I am fascinated by the processes by which we dehumanize one another, the slow crawl of corruption into even the most well-intentioned souls, what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." This article is not to be missed by those with similar interests. Gourevitch and Morris manage to present Harman and the action surrounding her with a deep compassion, but also a sharply focused, unforgiving lens of their own.
Later, the gravity of her unit's abuse hits her. She writes, "Okay, I don't like that anymore...it went to far even I can't handle whats going on. I cant get it out of my head."
So even amid the "banality of evil" is the resilient voice of inner morals, the part of Harman that can not be deadened. She wasn't aware of it at the time, but clearly taking pictures was her conscience's way of being a witness, of documenting the dissonance, of resisting the numb.
The authors end the article with a reflection on the famous image of "Gilligan", the nickname given to the man (who, by the way, was proved innocent) standing on the box in a hood, wires hanging from his crucified form. They write:
The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does no show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading...The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot--or do not want to--understand about how it came to this.
Next week: Complications by Atul Gawande and then a double review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream and Elaine Tyler May's Homeward Bound.
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Two comments:
1) As long as you're going through old NYers, read the Jeffrey Eugenides short story from a few weeks back. It's not of specific interest to feminists, just a really interesting "when good people do bad things" story.
2) I think your review of the Morris/Gourevitch article glosses over Ms. Harman's own conduct. She did a lot worse things than throwing corn at prisoners, and you didn't mention them. I wasn't nearly as sympathetic as you; it was basically gang warfare (soldiers vs. Iraqis), and she was in a gang. The fact that she wasn't wholeheartedly committed to the gang's actions doesn't mean she's not culpable.
It was a great article; I hope your readers will check it out and make up their own minds.
I think I'll pick this up now. I wasn't going to. Sometimes it's painful to confront the knowledge that we are all a short series of event from being Harman, to look at what makes otherwise "decent" people evil.
Reminds me of the prisoner/guard study at Stanford (I think) in how uncomfortable it makes me.
Anywho, thanks for the tip.
i read this last weekend and i was equally struck by it.
1) it's just so ridiculous that people like Harmon took the fall for what happened at Abu Ghraib. this article and the people involved were explicit: THIS WAS US POLICY. why haven't he people of this country demanded accountability for higher military positions and--- umm---- BUSH? The Mi Li massacre inspired an entire movement. why are we no longer willing to put ourselves on the line to protest and reject current US policy on torture?
harmon and her team were also victimized by careless policy. they were forced to live within the walls of the prison they were guarding among the remains of people sadam hussein tortured to death. They were brutalized by snipers. i'm not saying this is an excuse to torture and humiliate the prisoners. I'm just saying that the US military needs to take better care of their people. This, of course, is especially true in light of the op ed concerning the rape of female soldiers.
It may be the Bush administration's policy that torture is no big deal, but you would need evidence of specific orders coming down to make a case against the torturers superiors. I certainly haven't heard of any such evidence.
There was the same problem with My Lai. Even though the commander said he was just following orders, there was no evidence of any specific orders to kill noncombatants. Besides, Nuremberg made it clear what happens to people who were "just following orders."
This crap happened under Bush's watch and the American public couldn't even be bothered to give him the boot in November 2004. It's not hard to see evidence of our country's overwhelming complacency.
i read that article last week, and it was definitely one of my favorite new yorker pieces.
I had a somewhat different reading of the article.
You state "Unlike most New Yorker pieces, which I find sometimes err on missing the voices of those at the center of the issue, this one is full of organic wanderings by the soldiers who got caught up in that horrendous place and time."
However, while the article does a great job in giving the viewpoint of the average American soldier, no mention is made of the Iraqi's. The men who were tortured are refered to only by their nicknames (given to them by the torturers), we learn next to nothing about who they are, how they ended up in prison, what happened to them etc. In fact, the article continues the job of "dehumanising" carried out so well by Harman and her Army buddies.
Thanks for posting this. I'll have to check out that article.
Kristen, this reminds me of the Stanford Prison Experiment too. It's really frightening what people will do when placed in certain situations.
According to this new york times article, a Justice Department memo suggests that the Bush administration approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques. It sounds like the document gave legal flexibility, but no specific orders were given. Like keshmeshi said, a case can't be made against the superiors if there isn't evidence that they gave orders. I agree that US policy needs to change and people need to stop being complacent.
I agree with some of the postings here. After reading the article I just felt sick. I agree that I was outraged my Hartman's actions and while conditioning played a role, it doesn't excuse it. In the worst of times, there are people who recognize the intolerable actions against others and stand up to stop it. Do these people have a higher moral code or are they braver? Does it matter? Shouldn't everyone be held to the same standards?
And she wasn't the only one to take the fall. Many are now in prison for their role in the fiasco. Unfortunately, those higher ups who also share the blame have not been prosecuted
I agree with Fallopian that conditioning doesn't excuse Hartman's behavior. It reminded me of the prison experiment since Hartman was known for being a decent person and yet she still participated in this, but that doesn't mean she couldn't have made a different decision and stood up against it. I found an article on slate here that discusses some differences between the prison study and Abu Ghraib. It argues that the study doesn't really explain what happened there since the conditions were different. The higher ups should definitely be held accountable for allowing this to happen, and policy needs to be changed to make it clear that torture is not acceptable.
There is plenty of evidence that torture is an official policy. First, we have the remarkable consistency of approaches to torture across a wide geographical range, from Baghram in Afghanistan, to the camps in Iraq, to Guantánamo, not to mention the "black sites".
Second, we have the testimony of the people involved, including some of the Iraqi victims and some US officers, including the former commander of the Abu Ghraib camp.
Third, we have the fact that no one was particularly worried about getting caught. We have plenty of faces in these photographs, which, more often than not, are posed. This is not the behaviour of someone worried about an official reprimand.
Fourth, we have Alberto Gonzalez' memo as White House counsel to the Bush Administration, which, far from being an impartial "issue" memo, bends over backwards to find ways either to define torture out of existence (as by using a disability benefits statute as a source for the definition of a key term), or to argue that the conduct should be legalised outright, the "quaint" Geneva Conventions notwithstanding.
Fifth, we have the public statements of administration officials themselves, from Bush on down, who try to have it both ways: "we do not torture [nor does anyone, using Gonzalez ' definition], but sometimes torture is necessary, not that I'm saying we torture people or anything."
Sixth, the complicity of medical officers at all of the known torture sites is well documented. See the excellent "Oath Betrayed" for a well-documented discussion of the involvement of the Medical Service in all stages of the torture.
Seventh, we have the Bush Administration's response to even mild and ineffectual attempts by Congress to ban torture, culminating in signing statements that declare that the operative provisions will not be enforced.
For those who aren't subscribers, the link to the New Yorker article mentioned in the post can be found on the New Yorker website.
For those who aren't subscribers, the link to the New Yorker article mentioned in the post can be found on the New Yorker website.