Philip Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. His books include We Wish to Inform You Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, about the Rwandan genocide, and Standard Operating Procedure, a history of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. On October 14, 2008, he spoke with Richard Locke, Professor of Writing at Columbia University School of the Arts, in a public event sponsored by the IRCPL as part of its Literature and Terror series.
Richard Locke: Over the past twelve years Philip Gourevitch has become one of the foremost American writers of what’s called Literary Nonfiction. He’s very much in the line of such predecessors as George Orwell and Joan Didion, and his work is notable for its flexibility, its variety, and its intensity. It makes full use of the literary techniques it shares with fiction and poetry. Such techniques as narrative, character development, dialogue, patterns of metaphor and imagery. And his work also comprises elements of a great range of other kinds of writing, bringing them together into a particularly electric and flexible combination. Memoir, personal essay, travel writing, profile, reportage, biography, history, cultural commentary. The flexibility of the form that Philip has been engaged in developing is precisely that it can manage to have so many pieces of other kinds of writing existing within the framework of a personal communication—a real dialogue with the reader as much as it is with himself and with the subject at hand.
With his three books and his many articles and essays and short stories, Philip Gourevitch has become justly celebrated for his scrupulosity, his courage, his compassion, and his unblinking perspicacity. He’s one of our finest contemporary writers, and I’m delighted that he can be with us here tonight. What we’re going to be talking about is, as Mark said, why and how do we respond to terror, as in Rwanda, as in Abu Ghraib, with or through literature?
Your first book, We Wish to Inform You Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families has a subtitle, “Stories from Rwanda.” This makes it clear that you’re going to be using narrative as a literary and a cognitive device. As you say in the book, quote, “This is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another. A book about how we imagine our world. This is what fascinates me most about existence,” you write. “The peculiar necessity of imagining what is in fact real.” And then in the new book you take it one step further. There’s a corollary to that perception, because in Standard Operating Procedure you write, “There’s a constant temptation when rendering an account of history to distort reality by trying to make too much sense of it.” Could you elaborate? All or nothing.
Philip Gourevitch: It seemed kind of self-evident that the kind of lines you write and think, maybe you should keep them out because they’re so obvious. Why respond to anything through literature? I suppose because I don’t know how else, or that seems the best way. I don’t mean that to sound flip or arch at all, but somewhere fairly early on it occurred to me that the responses to the world that meant the most to me were in books. And ninety-nine out of a hundred of them, and there were hundreds, were probably novels. Novels seemed to not require the categorization of human experience and the slicing of it one way as opposed to another, or one angle of regard as opposed to another. They allow a kind of comprehensiveness, the intersection of public and private life, of interior and exterior experience of cataclysmic history and utterly petty personal or private perception or grand personal nobility. All of these things could operate simultaneously in conjunction with one another in fiction, but achieve truth, some kind of verisimilitude. Novels gave the idea that in fact one was experiencing life, albeit distilled and shed of some of the boredom that exactly entails. And shed of some of the fear and some of the other sort of nasty experiences that you don’t usually have when you have the time to read a book.
Why does one become a writer? Because at some point you feel like the most meaningful experience you’re having has something to do with reading about the world, and you want to be doing what they’re doing. You want to be in that conversation. I suppose that’s why people play ball, or why people do other sorts of things. They think, “I want to do that,” you know? And you obviously feel like in some way it speaks to you quite complexly as an approach. And specifically I found that, when you’re in college, and you’re actually encountering these things broken into academic disciplines…
I studied ape behavior because it was the closest thing to novel writing I could get to without actually declaring myself a writer when I hadn’t written anything. That’s what I started with, and then human history, which is the closest thing to ape behavior you can get without having to tell your parents you want to go to Rwanda when you’re eighteen, and so forth. It all seemed to me that it kept coming back to novels, to a certain approach to human experience. And then I started to discover that there was a literature that was more directly observed.
If you think about the really great novels, certainly of terror—it wasn’t at all clear to me that that would be a subject that would absorb me particularly when I got started. But there were characters in some of the novels that mattered to me most, like the character of the terrorist Chen in André Malraux’s Man’s Fate. Or characters in some of Conrad’s or Dostoevsky’s books, or more contemporary books, like characters in Naipaul novels, where you feel that the writer is writing from an extremely intense personal experience of action. And that’s why some of the novelists that are more contemporary who address this seem to me to be entering it abstractly. They’re questioning the terrorist or the impulse to act, the impulse to violence. It comes from completely outside their humanist bubble. And I was always drawn to this quality in writing and literature that lets you become close to the actor, not just the good guy, but the villain as well. To understand terror not as something inhuman or an experience that troubles one. Not as something that is external, but as something that is internal. And I don’t mean in the simplistic way that everybody says, “I guess we all have the potential to be nasty.”
I’m more interested in the political formation of these things because we may all have that potential, but there are certain moments in history when it sure gets harnessed awfully vigorously into a defining force for an entire people or a civilization or a culture at that moment. That interests me, and I thought that for me, that had to be something observed. Writers who matter to me at times, like Primo Levi—Primo Levi’s a memoirist. I hope never to be a memoirist of any of the subjects I’ve written about. I would hope that never should befall anybody here. And yet these things are part of our experience in this time. And so something like Rwanda happens, and—I had been writing about Holocaust commemoration at the time. I’d been looking at the way that it was getting absorbed in the early nineties into our culture. You had the museums popping up, the execrably named Museum of Tolerance out in LA, as if tolerance was somehow or other the ideal to which we should aspire. In other words, “I can tolerate the fact that you’re a Jew.” You know, that’s supposed to be this wonderful thing that we’ve learned from the Holocaust. And then in Washington they have the Museum to the Extermination of Jews in Europe, which didn’t seem to me to belong to the Mall.
And you had President Clinton at the opening of that preaching over it, saying, “This stands as proof that we will never let these things happen again, and that we stand guard against these things, and that it’s outside our traditions.” You had the Spielberg movie where you were told that in the unfortunate event that you should find that you’re a Nazi, you would at least the opportunity of identifying with a nice Nazi who, while profiting extensively financially from his Jews, also saved them from extermination. Which is a good thing! But it is a limited good thing, and it is a movie that creates a fiction, which is the fiction that there is an out. That there is always for you the opportunity to identify in some important way with either the victim or the whistle-blower, the better than bad guy, the bad guy with a conscience or an uneasy conscience. And I felt like none of these things were telling me about this world. And that’s where I felt that we were failing to imagine it.
Locke: Right.
Gourevitch: That’s what the first quote in the Rwanda book really is about. That reporting is an act of engaging with factual documentation and with fact-checkable documentation. That is the burden of nonfiction as opposed to fiction. But in order to be truthful, you’ve got to get at it by using your imagination. And as far as the distortion of reality by making it more real, I suppose that’s a way of saying that we intend to simplify and over-tidy-up our view of the world, and that there is a way in which we explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that are false in order to make it seem neat and orderly. And make too much sense of it. To come up with a theory. There are a lot of theories. There were the theories that were kicked around about Abu Ghraib. Philip Zimbardo’s theory that if you are a Stanford graduate student presided over by a person who wants you to commit atrocities, you may in fact do so. This was the Stanford prison experiment where he set his graduate students in a situation that he controlled and then watched them misbehave, because he put them in a situation where they would and extrapolated from that that this had something to do with military behavior. It doesn’t. I felt that the theories, people found comfort in them, and they were wrong. And so I felt that, in a sense, the elaboration of reality by reporting and writing about it as much as possible from imagining the insides of the people who were involved in it is the best I can do with it.
Locke: But you make a connection then between the psychology of such violence and a larger political context.
Gourevitch: Well, there is.
Locke: For example, at one point in the first book, you said, “Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality, even if you have to kill a lot of them to make that happen.”
Gourevitch: Yeah, that comes in a chapter on the history of Rwanda and the falsification of that history into national myths or legends or what have you. I use those words because they’re twisted stories. They’re deceptions. And they’re propaganda. And if you combine a very monolithic narrative structure, i.e., a government with one voice and a cowed, compliant population that is brutalized by violence to accept an account of things, they’ll accept that account. And of course it’s also a comment on what I do. That some people like to say the pen’s mightier than the sword. I’m not convinced of that, but I think it’s an ongoing struggle we’re involved in. But I do think that I don’t kill a lot of people to try and get people to occupy my version of reality. I try to make it more persuasive. And that’s why it’s not always a winning battle. And I do keep lists, of course, of those I’ve spared.
But no, I’m serious about this. When you’re trying to understand Rwandan history, you start to see these distortions, and the creation of identities that are set against each other, and the creation of two groups within that population that are actually turned into mortal enemies by a mixture of storytelling and violence, where the blood makes the fiction true. Then you have to start to understand that that’s what that kind of power is. It becomes real. So at the same time as you’re explaining that it’s constructed as a fiction, you’re also explaining that it is real, and you don’t want to say one or the other. To say it’s a fiction is a fiction. To say it’s real is to ignore that it’s also a fiction. And so it’s a real fiction. That’s where people are living, and that’s where people are actually being killed.
Locke: You say in that book at one point, “Genocide is an exercise in community building.”
Gourevitch: Yeah. I say that because it occurred to me that at some level we make this mistake in thinking of the crime, and political crimes in general that involve mass violence, as being equal to other crimes that are done without an ideal, or without a Utopian overlay. And so when you’re obeying a political order by committing murder or extreme violence against someone, you’re not committing a crime according to that political order and its laws and its rules. You are obeying its laws and its rules. You are serving its cause. And so at that point there is the definition of some enemy, some group that is to be eliminated. It’s almost always presented in genocide in particular, which is a very extreme form of this, as a purging, a cleansing, the expulsion of an alien body, and the bringing together of us by the identification and extermination of them.
And in fact, in the case of Rwanda it’s actually pretty explicit, where you see that the times where violence is harnessed as a tool by the majority Hutu population, throughout its post-colonial history, are times not when Tutsis are getting rowdy on the edges of Hutu power, but when Hutu power, with a small ‘p,’ is actually starting to deteriorate and fragment and there’s contest and struggle amongst the Hutu polity. And so the way that you unify them is by the creation of a common enemy and the call to a common struggle.
Locke: But then there becomes the next step because you also said that, “My aim, as a writer, is to make readable, even beautiful books that take a deeply pessimistic view of history.” Why are you drawn to what you yourself call these repellent subjects? How and why can beauty be ever created from such repellent subjects?
Gourevitch: Well, the subjects don’t become beautiful. I hope that sometimes the books do, or maybe a page or a paragraph or a sentence within them, because ideally, if they do, they will help a reader imagine what I’m trying to get at, which is some pretty essential aspect of the human experience. I don’t know exactly why I’ve been drawn to these things, why it happens that two out of my three books happen to deal with pretty atrocious behavior, and the other one happens to deal with localized atrocious behavior. But leaving that aside, they’re really interesting matters. They’re matters that actually define our world in a very big way. The extermination in Rwanda took place, and it vanished from our news, and at the same time, as I said, we were telling ourselves that we were in this age where we stood against genocide, where the lessons of the past had been learned and all of this. I thought, wait, we’re telling ourselves something that actually means we’re in a dangerous situation. The story we’re telling ourselves about how we are now safe from this because this happened, and we’ve learned never to allow it to happen again, is a false story.
And it just happened. Maybe we don’t even believe it. Maybe the terrible lesson of Rwanda is that there is no such thing as common humanity, and that it just doesn’t matter. Maybe the most horrible, pessimistic thing about Rwanda is that there is no price to pay for standing around and watching this happen somewhere halfway around the other earth to people you didn’t know existed before you found out they were in trouble or gone. Maybe there is no price to humanity. Maybe humanity is actually much coarser and cruder and scarier than our wish for it. And so I think that that’s actually, leaving aside, as I say, for the moment, the question of why I’m drawn to it, why addressing it becomes compelling. Because it plagues one’s mind. It touches on many of the ultimate questions one asks oneself about what it means to be a human, what it means to be in societies, what it means to be in a powerful country where perhaps someone’s supposed to have some concern for others beyond its borders. What it means that we have a lot of, again, stories we tell ourselves, and these stories take the form of international laws and international treaties.
We tell ourselves that we actually stand for these things, and we sign on the line, and then we don’t hold them up. Where does that leave us, and what does that mean about ourselves? Those things do interest me. They do engage my imagination. They engage my observation, and I find that trying to interrogate them directly, by going to the place and talking to the people, invariably turns out to be enormously surprising and rewarding. Making that beautiful afterwards? You do your best. I mean, I don’t know if I do, but the alternative is that you make it ugly, and that you write a bad sentence. Wouldn’t want to wish that Goya had made worse etchings in the horrors of war. That he had made them crumbier art. That he was less talented. That he had tried to use his talent less in order somehow to communicate that he was disgusted. No. We wouldn’t feel all those things.
Locke: Well what you’re doing, of course, is disputing a received notion of a beautiful, or at least a smooth story. And what you’re discovering is a method of interrogating that leads you yourself to propose an alternative act of understanding, yet also the shaping of another story, an alternative story according to perhaps different rules, or different presuppositions.
Gourevitch: Yeah. I mean, I don’t think it’s such a beautiful story. It’s a cover-up. It’s a papering over. It’s sort of like, “Yeah, we’re all alright, and it feels better that way.” I say pretty early, I think, in the book, that some of the words that are used a lot in Rwanda, they crop again when you start dealing with Abu Ghraib. These are stories that one’s inclination is to look away from. And these so-called beautiful stories are instruments of looking away. And when you have words like unthinkable and unspeakable and unimaginable, well, our business is to think, speak, and imagine. And that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, and so we’re telling ourselves with these words, “You’re off the hook. Don’t worry about it. It’s beyond us. It’s just a bunch of animals behaving insanely. These are aberrant. These are not really us.” In one form or another. That’s wrong. It’s also one of the reasons I like the villains, too, you know. The villains are interesting. They’re not interesting as sexy villains. They’re interesting because they disarm you by being straightforward about their villainy.
Locke: Why don’t you think then that political science or anthropology or history are sufficient responses? For example, why do you have no footnotes or indices in your book?
Gourevitch: Well, that’s just for people who want to reread them. No, the honest truth is, because the books I read that mattered to me never had indexes — I mean, in literature. A publisher at one point wanted to make an index for the Rwanda book, and it made it look fifteen times more anthropologically African. Every name was foreign, suddenly, and it compressed the foreignness of it because all it dealt with is place names and people names. And then there were these people names, who basically exist in no account of the history of the place except my reporting, because I stumbled on them, and they’re kind of accidental, except that they represent a bunch of voices in addition that I heard that I don’t quote. So to put them into an index, it all just seemed like the index created some kind of pull-out skeleton that was false. It created another account of my book that wasn’t my account of my book. And if people want to do that, that’s their business, but it’s not my business to offer it up. That I really felt. I have no reproach whatever with any other discipline. That’s silly for me to present this as this versus that.
One would never imagine you sitting here and asking an anthropologist or political scientist why he’s not writing a novel or a narrative that doesn’t have these damn footnotes, so really, it’s because that’s my medium. And when you write these things, when you write a New Yorker article on something, you read a lot of the academic and other expert scholars, the work that’s come before. You absorb it. And on some level, in the back of your mind, you hope you aren’t seen as an amateur, a punk. You want to say something that might interest them. You hope that they find it interesting. You don’t necessarily expect to tell them anything new because their job is to pay attention to the level very different from your readership. But you’re trying to simultaneously talk to people who may never have thought about this before, and to whom you think it is rewarding for them to think about it, as opposed to somebody who is generally writing for an audience of people who have thought about it at the same level of immersion. And that’s just a completely different undertaking.
Locke: How would you describe the project of actually writing Standard Operating Procedure, working with the interview takes that the filmmaker, Errol Morris, was using? What techniques did you employ? How did you begin to think about matters of structure?
Gourevitch: That’s a good question. Maybe I should explain for a second how the whole thing came about.
Locke: That’s what I’m thinking. To start with.
Gourevitch: The book Standard Operating Procedure came about when Errol Morris, the filmmaker, started sending me transcripts—lengthy transcripts of interviews he’d been conducting with American soldiers who’d served at Abu Ghraib, including those who’d appeared in and taken the photographs of prisoner abuse in the fall of 2003 at the prison in Iraq. And he was partway into what became a monumental interviewing project. It generated about two and a half million words of transcript, and just to give you a sense if you’re not in the business of what that means, this book is about a hundred and ten thousand words. So, a lot. A shelf of these books. And he sent them to me, and I started reading them, and I found it instantly fascinating to hear the voices of these soldiers. I realized almost immediately, although I don’t remember what he sent me first, that they didn’t really seem to tell the story; they seemed to tell a story I hadn’t heard.
I hadn’t heard these voices. I hadn’t heard this level of detail. I hadn’t heard this level of uninterrupted narrative from the voice of people inside the experience. And he then said, “Well, I’ve got a two-hour movie I’m making.” He does a lot re-enactments and other stuff, so it’s not even two hours of interviews. “You know, this should be a book.” I then started working with these—well I went to a lot of the interviews for their filming—and working with these transcripts as they accumulated and trying to figure out how to tell the story, heavily based on these interviews, on these voices, wanting them to sound off for very long periods, but also feeling the need to take a kind of control of them.
One of the first things that really struck me was the intense claustrophobia of the physical setting of this prison, a prison at the end of the supply lines, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, under constant attack. Undermanned, undersupplied, in every way underequipped, with untrained soldiers, who are told, “These are the worst of the worst of the Iraqi terrorists and insurgents. Guard ‘em, soften ‘em up for interrogation,” given instructions that it’s a whole new order, etcetera. It was a kind of horror that was taking place there that was created by American policy, and by deliberate policies of the administration and the military there. And these soldiers entered this, and they had no view from the outside. They didn’t know what the policies in Washington were that were forming them.
Almost all of the accounts that I’d seen written of the war on terror focused heavily on the torture memos of Rumsfeld, the sort of Sy Hersh and Mark Danner and Jane Mayer, who’d gotten some great documentation of the perfidy in Washington, and the administration’s deliberate undermining of hundreds of years of American jurisprudence and principle in order to create this terror regime. But what one hadn’t seen is how that actually was experienced by the little guy at the end of the thing. And, mind you, this little guy was the only guy who’d ever gotten held to account and gone to jail. These were the only people who had ever gone to jail, who were below the rank of Staff Sergeant and had never seen a policy. So it pissed me off, as well, which is always good fuel when you’re writing. So I felt that there’s something about the claustrophobia, and the blindness was part of what I wanted to capture—the idea that we were dealing with people who had been made into instruments of a very great injustice. Some of them had gotten into it; some of them had not liked it at all, but who had then become victims of a great injustice at the same time, a different one. And I tried to figure out, How do you make sense of it all? Two and a half million words. So I created folders and folders and folders on my computer, and I dropped and dragged interviews into these folders. There was a folder called ‘dogs,’ and a folder called ‘women at Abu Ghraib,’ ‘children at Abu Ghraib,’ ‘October 24th,’ ‘October 25th,’ ‘naked pyramid,’ ‘AQ’ for this prisoner, and ‘Gus’ for that prisoner, and ‘Gilligan’ for that prisoner, the prisoner on the box.
And I took these different interviews, and I would go through, and every time somebody would mention any of these particular things, I would put them into this same folder identifying who the speaker was, and then they’d be things just like, ‘On Photography.’ I had things that didn’t really end up happening, like ‘The Pleasure Principle’ was a folder I had where I sort of tried to pull out all the quotes about people who were upset about this because it looked like the soldiers were having fun. I became interested for a while and decided to kind of leave it aside because it became too intrusive. The question of whether it really makes any difference at all if they’re having fun—so what? If I come up to you and I cut your head off and say, “That was awful,” or I come up to you and I cut your head off and say, “That was excellent!” Is it a greater crime? And if I stand around for my portrait looking sad or happy next to your severed head, does it in anyway diminish the severing of your head or increase it? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but it’s really interesting that we all think so. It segues into the whole question of contrition at trials. “He didn’t show contrition. He wasn’t sad that he killed his mother. So, therefore, he must hang. He was sad that he killed his mother, and he said all the right things to his mother’s relatives, therefore he’s a good boy.” And so I found that interesting. So you’d have all these folders, and you’d start to look at the places that overlapped and the places that obviously didn’t and try to understand them and construct the thing out of it.
Locke: But it’s a lot more than simple a collage of different voices.
Gourevitch: Yeah.
Locke: For example, I think it’s important to emphasize that this book does begin with Saddam Hussein’s 2002 release of prisoners from Abu Ghraib, who come roaring out in your first three pages right into the laps of the reader. And immediately after that, after these people have been released, and there have been mass weddings even at the same time as all these people have been let out of jail in all sorts of elaborate ways, the very next thing, you turn the page, and you’re suddenly with two guys from the Utah correctional facilities who are about to recreate Utah correctional jail in what is left of Abu Ghraib. Why did you choose to begin with Saddam Hussein 2002 instead of let’s say, some tremendous quote from some poor schnook whose uh, who’s managing to cut someone’s head off at the same time. Why did you choose there?
Gourevitch: I mean, hearing you paraphrase it, I suppose part of it is because it’s funny. I mean, honestly, this is such an absurd war. It’s truly absurd in the theater of the absurd sense in all of its claims. So part of what I was up against is, there are layers and layers of frame around the way that we look at this thing. There were hundreds of thousands of reasons given for this war. None of them have made any sense. None of them have held up. They were thrown out there—the reason we went to war—who knows? Some guys in Washington wanted to, and they could, and they did, and they dragged us into it, and they never bothered having the respect for us to explain why, or to actually make any of it make sense. They just bagged it part way in there. They fucked it up, frankly, and they left us all to deal with that, and they left these soldiers to deal with it, and they made a horrible mess of it.
But around this is a kind of epic Mesopotamian drama. This is a serious place. This is a place with its own history. It’s a place with a tremendous background. And we thought, “Ah, Saddam, he’s a dupe!” We made him out to be some kind of cartoon character, you know, a tin horn crook, or a tin pot dictator—these are the kind of things that you hear, you know, “We’re gonna smoke him out!” And in fact he was playing us like a cheap violin right then and there. He let out everybody from prison. It was like the Mariel Boat Lift from Cuba, you know. Everybody was saying, “Oh, he’s keeping his people in prison. It’s a terrible police state.” So OK, fine. Here come all the car thieves and rapists and mentally disturbed and psychotic, drug addicts. We’ll put them on rafts, send them to Miami, and you can put ‘em in your jails.” And you know, we were stuck with them. It was a kind of brilliant rhetorical action. I’m not advocating it, or approving of it, or saying that he doesn’t run a police state. I’m saying, it was a clever move. And he kind of had the last laugh and got rid of a bunch of people he was very happy to be rid of.
Saddam did this incredible thing. He let them out, at the moment where he’s still playing this brinksmanship. And remember, this is a man who’d successfully played brinksmanship with a lot of people, for a long time, and always figured we just didn’t have the stomach for it. And he got away with it, and he lets all these people out of jail. And it shows you the jail. It lets you see inside this place that now is supposedly what we’re fighting against. At the very core of it, this is what we’re fighting against. And we go in with this sense that look, we made him open his prisons even without firing a shot, and immediately, almost blindly, we start to recreate this thing. And you have these guys who come in, poor, decent guys, these guys from the Utah prisons. I mean, they got ridiculed in The Nation magazine as having imported torture from Utah to Abu Ghraib: absurd. But they were in fact these guys who had been brought in on contract for the justice department to try and create a new criminal justice system in Iraq. So I also thought it was important to start with, where did this come from, how did we end up in this prison?
A lot of people had this strange notion, you might remember, there was a lot of posturing in Washington after the Abu Ghraib pictures came out, with congressmen saying, “We should blow up that prison and raze it as a symbolic act.” As if the problem was the prison, not the way we behaved at the prison. And that the place was sort of haunted and spooky and did bad things to people. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. And they were going in there, and they didn’t even see what they were doing. And they actually believed. And so there’s also something about American idealism that I want to remind us of. This is not hostile to American idealism. It’s hostile to people who are hostile to it by creating large, violent messes. I thought of this book as kind of a patriotic book, and so I open up with that tableau to remind us, this is a place we never thought about. It’s not a place we imagined or understood. The people who went in here had no idea what they were dealing with. Here come these guys, perfectly decent guys. These soldiers. I’ve got no problem with most of these soldiers. The soldiers who behaved appallingly and treated prisoners criminally, none of them had a record of doing that until they got into a situation where it was ordained from on high. None of them ever acted like this on their own or outside of a political context. That’s the story, and to be reminded of that, where it’s our image versus theirs.
Locke: It had been said at the beginning, when some of the first reports came out, that the photos said it all. In large part your entire book is a refutation of that reduction. The book itself is a series of frames, getting closer and closer to some idea of the way in which the official stories, one layer after the other, can be refuted. But in the middle, or in our perception of Abu Ghraib, there’s always, there has to be explication of the photos. In some sense, the book is a refutation of that. In what sense is your book more than an account of the photos? And for that matter, why are there then no photos at all in the book?
Gourevitch: Well, the photos are hideous. And I really didn’t like looking at them. That’s—to be really honest—a certain level of it was I didn’t want to have a book that made you want to slam it shut. I wanted to have a book that made you think, “OK, I’m not sure I’m up for this. This is a repellent subject.” And as you started to read it, you start reading about this thing about Saddam, and you think, “Oh yeah, maybe I’ve read about that in the Times,” or maybe, “How come I didn’t know that?” You read about these guys from Utah. They’re not the people you expect. So you start to soften up your resistance, as they would say at Abu Ghraib. And you start to enter the story. I don’t break you, but you know, I get you in there a little bit. Which is true. None of it’s made up. I mean, it’s interesting in how it got there. So I felt that, and I also felt that that the photographs had so dominated our perception of this story from the very beginning, and they completely contained our perceptions. And I wanted, as it were, to put them in their proper place, which is as artifacts of something much much larger.
The fact is they’re visually very powerful. And they’re very repellent. And they are shocking. They continue to shock, even when you’ve seen a lot of them a lot of the time just on your screen, moving past them, whatever. And so to put them in there meant that you would always be elbowing against them. You’d always in a sense be arguing with their framing of the thing, rather than simply describing the story around them. And I didn’t have to wonder about whether I was presenting or not presenting them because they exist. They’re out there. You can find them. There was no question of me withholding an image or images that don’t—that you might otherwise be deprived of, as journalistic data. So I was relieved of that. But I feel that the story is much larger. It’s a story of American policy that begins with a long section that kind of winds its way back.
I started to look at the period around May ’03 when the war changed, and that’s the moment when Bush appeared on the aircraft carrier and made a speech about the end of major combat operations in Iraq. People saw it, this Mission Accomplished banner, as premature triumphalism. But I realized it was actually a legal frame that he was creating because it meant that you were moving from traditional combat operations, a major combat operation meaning against a sovereign foe, when you take prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Those prisoners were suddenly being released as of May 1st, and instead we move to this dodgy war-on-terror frame where you have this constructed fiction called the “enemy combatant,” “illegal combatant,” who is a security detainee. These became the people at Abu Ghraib who were there. So all of this stuff is going on in the book that explains in a sense what the photographs show. The photographs are actually pictures of American policy. Right? That doesn’t sound very interesting if you wanted to see a picture of a policy. But they are photographs of an American policy, and I wanted you to feel that.
And I also wanted you to re-individualize, to some extent, these people. And not because I was worried about their individuality so much, but because there’s a tendency to talk about “the bad apples,” “the soldiers,” “the prisoners.” These groups through which the fact that events take place by a combination of very different minds interacting gets lost. And ultimately, I wanted to close off some of the oxygen on the idea that if I was there I would’ve done differently. Which everybody claims. Who knows?
Locke: One of the most interesting and immediately palpable things about the book is the extreme differences among the different individual characters at Abu Ghraib. I mean, you’re full of minor characters, not just those up the chain of the command. Not even the celebrated few who took the rap. And there’s a great variety of the kinds of information that we get about each of these characters. We begin to get a sense of who they are, how you build them literarily. You’re using a whole variety of different kinds of techniques of information gathering, but then putting them forth as some kind of palpable characters of the sort that we might follow in a work of fiction. You not only hear about Sabrina Harman or Graner or Lynndie England, but there are all these prisoners who are suddenly more than just images in the photographs, but each one of them begins to take on a kind of mad identity of their own, and there’s an enormous variety of them.
I mean, you’ve got people like “Gilligan” or “Taxi Driver” or “Gus” or “Santa Claus,” you’ve even got this psychotic—you once said he was like a performance artist—this guy that everybody called “Shit Boy” because he spent his time covering himself in all kinds of excrement and behaving in almost what appeared to be a kind of mad parody of his own torture. So that the levels of self-representation become both aesthetic and at the same time so clearly psychotic. And the two begin to interact, one with the other, within the frame of the policy that’s memorialized, if you will, in these photographs. I was also, of course, struck that there was a ten-year-old boy around there being used, incarcerated in the prison and simply being used to intimidate his father as best he could. My point is that the story’s much more—much richer than the photographs, and much richer than the narratives that have been imposed upon it.
Gourevitch: Well, much of the worst stuff that was happening there was in fact not on camera. I mean, to me, the fact that you are holding thousands and thousands of prisoners, without charge, without properly identifying them, without in fact the army believing for a minute—the army, by its own admission, has described more than sixty or seventy percent of them as having been there with no cause at all. That they posed no threat to the security of the occupation forces. We were holding innocent people without charges, having arrested them in mass sweeps, in bestial conditions, concentration camp conditions. And I don’t mean extermination camp conditions. I mean, you take a lot of people and you concentrate them at one point so they’re no longer out there. Beyond barbed wire, in outdoor facilities, where they were under constant mortar fire from insurgents outside the prison walls. Prisoners were being killed. Prisoners were being fed garbage. Literally, the contractors were bringing in dumpsters.
Of course, we no longer actually use soldiers to do ninety percent of the tasks that soldiers used to do, so we hire either international contractors to do illegal things, or we hire local contractors to misserve our cause. And they were rioting, and we were using live ammunition on them. And these things struck me as in some ways greater outrages than some of the humiliations bordering on physical torture that were captured on film and whose shock value is largely from their sexual prurience and nastiness. And I wanted to get past that because again, the story to me is not about a couple of guards and their perverse moments on the night shift. But it’s about a kind of larger political system that placed them there. And that’s another reason that I draw attention away from the photographs while circling those photographs as the evidence. Because, I also think the photographs have been misunderstood in one really important aspect.
I mean, the simplest way of putting it is, had they been taken by somebody in my line of work, it would’ve been a great scoop, right? We all know that. If a photojournalist had taken them, they are the iconic photographs of the war on terror after 9/11, after the fall of the towers. They’re the book-end to those photographs. They’re the most-seen photographs since then, most reproduced, most melded into iconography. But to me, it’s not cultural studies. It’s not about, you know, the question of imagery and the regard of the viewer, and the idea of the way that this fits into our imagery. Really interesting things could be said about digital photography culture amongst kids who are in the army these days who swap these photographs and so on. But to me it really was, these photographs performed a public service. If they were staged, if they actually didn’t show the worst of it, what they did was they told us torture was happening at Abu Ghraib, and they were right. Even if what they showed us were fictional moments, it was still right. Even if a lot of quibbles could be had with what’s happening in each frame, so that it turns out that the naked man that Lynndie England is dragging on the leash isn’t really being dragged around on a leash for his sexual humiliation, but is being extracted from a cage, etcetera.
Locke: And that it took twenty-two seconds—
Gourevitch: Doesn’t matter. Naked prisoners were being strung up and kept in cages at Abu Ghraib in violation of all US Military doctrine, standing principles, and law. And that’s what mattered. And one had to always pull back from the kind prurient distraction of the photographs to the actual substance of the core of those photographs.
Locke: In thinking about these matters in all of your books, you usually really resist the invocation of the word “evil.” And you once said, I thought quite surprisingly, that yes, that “evil” is totally inadequate, and not something that you feel should be trotted out as a be-all and end-all explanation for what’s happening. But you also said something just immediately after that: ”what really matters is leadership.” That leadership matters. You even quote the Rwandan General Paul Kagame saying that people can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good. For someone who’s saying that you’re drawn to subjects that are particularly expressing a pessimistic view of history, this seems rather surprisingly optimistic.
Gourevitch: Well I think Kagame, who’s now the President, meant it that way. But he was speaking about taking genocidal killers and giving them a little bit of training and new uniforms and making them national soldiers in the post-genocide army. And I was saying, “Can you really do this?” And he said, “People can be made bad and taught to be good.” And I thought, you know, it all depends where you sit and who’s saying it. It can be the single most cynical or the single most hopeful thing you can say about people—that people are deeply malleable. And therefore leadership does matter. And people are malleable especially in groups and in tightly controlled situations that are frightening and physical and have large political power behind them. So when I say that I don’t like the word evil, particularly, I don’t have anything that strong against it, except that I feel that the problem of the word “evil” is that it often describes something external that possesses one. It gets you off the hook from having to think the thing through.
I’m not saying that there isn’t, broadly speaking, perhaps, some kind of cosmic struggle in the way that we experience our world. There were times when looking at General Kagame, for all of the violence and faults that I at times saw, I felt that he was at the front line of that fight for us. This guy was out there, while we were all dithering around preaching about common humanity, and this and that. He was killing these Genocidaires and stopping it. He was stopping it. He was keeping creation somewhat wholer. Because they talk about crimes against humanity: genocide’s a crime against creation. It’s an attempt to eliminate an entire component of it. And that seems to me to be something you mess with at your peril. And he was the one who actually put that peril there, and I think we owe that particular moment of those people who fought that fight our very full attention and some respect.
I find boring the phrase “the banality of evil,” mostly because I don’t think it’s what she meant. I think she meant “the banality of evil-doers,” not of evil. She meant this little owlish guy, this petty bureaucrat. So banal. Not evil itself. The Holocaust wasn’t banal. I don’t think even she would think so. So it seems to be one of those words that just doesn’t explain enough and that we use to cover ourselves from actually having to get inside it. Wicked is good enough. But it doesn’t suggest an external force. We don’t talk about the force of wicked, you know? Or wickedness was rife upon the land. And so yeah, I really do think that that’s where my pessimism comes in, from the fact that—as I was saying earlier—this idea that we have, that we will behave well. That we, even the people who read these books. You read these books, you go to those museums, you see those movies, and you’re going to be on the right side. You’re always given somebody to identify with. You’re always somehow told that you are—that there’s this humanist exception for you—and you don’t know that. Hopefully you won’t know that.
What I would say is that leadership matters because ideally, with good leadership, the fewest number of us will ever be put to the test of whether we’d behave decently under pressure or not. That is what political organization seems to me to be for. To get us to a place where as few of us as possible ever get found out for actually being quite dangerous to others under pressure. Because what does history really tell us? That the great mass of Europeans lived with it. Took part in it. Had no problem with it. That the ordinary soldier put in a situation where at the very least they’re asked to look the other way, where they’re not supposed to ruffle the chain of command, where the chain of command reinforces it, lives with it. “They blew up our buildings. They’d have cut off our heads if they took us prisoner.”
So that became the standard. The line I say in the book is, when you’re fighting terror with terror, how do you know which is which? I think that was very much the rationale we got into as we rationalized it. But we’re not far from that, we live with it. And I think one of the reasons we should be nervous about it is that it’s not an issue that’s had much traction in our public life because I think people don’t mind.
Locke: There’s that extraordinary moment when one of the young women, I think it’s Sabrina Harman, says that she really felt that she couldn’t really cope with what was going on. She didn’t really feel she wanted to participate with it anymore. And she would see other people sailing into action against these various detainees, and she felt that it was a lack in herself that she couldn’t really participate enthusiastically in any way. And her final excuse was, “I guess they were just more patriotic than I was.”
Gourevitch: Yeah, she sort of felt like, if she’s told to do something she doesn’t like, she felt maybe it was a bad form of individualism, that she was saying, “I’d rather not.”
Locke: Both of your books, they’d be the first and the third, end with acts of refusal. People saying no into the face of extreme coercion. A group of school girls, both Tutsi and Hutu, at the very end of We Wish to Inform You, are together, and they’re asked by people, at the point of a gun, to please separate themselves into the two ethnic groups. And all these girls in this mixed school refuse to do it. And they’re then massacred. But they refuse to identify themselves as belonging to one group or the other. In the very end of Standard Operating Procedure, you have again someone that’s speaking out, one of the prisoners, who refuses to comply in any way. You spoke to me and you said it’s sort of like your Bartleby moment.
Gourevitch: I think of him as Bartleby.
Locke: Explain why you felt he was the only free man there.
Gourevitch: There’s this guy named “Gus,” who is the guy you may know from the photograph of Lynndie England with the man at the end of the leash, the naked man at the end of what looks like a dog leash, being pulled out of his cell. And these nicknames, by the way, were the nicknames that were used by the American soldiers for these Iraqis. And I don’t use their Iraqi names in the book, although through prisoner number and correlation charts we were able to figure them out, because presumably these people were innocent. Why identify—there’s nothing really gained by it. It’s one of those kind of facts that makes you feel like you lose something when you don’t actually know something. You don’t really know more about who they are. And I wanted to stay inside the American heads. I wanted you to feel always that sense of them with their prisoner names. “Gus” refuses to eat. He refuses clothing in this place where everybody’s otherwise being forced to strip naked.
He would always say, “I will kill you! I will kill you, Americans! I will kill all the Jews. I will kill all the Americans!” And they thought he was some big Al Qaeda guy, or maybe an old Ba’athist heavy from Saddam’s interior security forces, until they found out that he was actually just a local town drunk who’d been picked up and thrown onto the back of an American military truck. But he just didn’t like being in captivity very much. They had to force-feed him with IV bags. He was on a complete hunger strike, effectively. And they panicked about this at one point. They loaded him into the back of an ambulance—he said, “I’ll eat if you take me to Baghdad. I want to be taken to Baghdad.” So they drove him all around the prison yard for about half an hour to a hospital that was about twenty feet from the prison cell, and let him out and said, “You’re in Baghdad,” and he started to eat. And then the doctor said, “Why’s this guy here?” and returned him to the prison, at which point he didn’t trust them very much anymore. He would always say, “I refuse.”
And there was this one guy, Hydrue Joyner, in his interview he clowned a lot. But he just kept saying, “I refuse. I refuse,” as he quoted him, and I thought, “He’s Bartleby.” He’s Bartleby, who says, “I would prefer not to.” And winds up in the tombs. And “I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to.” And I felt—at one point I say, this prisoner, maybe he’s the only truly free man at Abu Ghraib because he’s the only guy who in some ways is refusing the order of the place. And I say, we all made our accommodations. And at that point I do this “we,” I think it’s the second or third last line, but to include us—us way beyond the place who didn’t really have anything to do with it at the time. And he refused. Bartleby died. That great story of Melville’s [Bartleby the Scrivener] is really the original work of what now is known as “dissident literature,” but he died in the tombs. Melville had a better last line—what can I say? Alas Bartleby, alas humanity. I couldn’t go that far.
Locke: I think maybe we should take some questions.
Question 1: I’m curious about your problem with the word “evil” as describing something external in life. I’d certainly think of it as being scary because we think of it as something internal, something inbuilt, something natural to human beings. And I wonder also about your pessimistic view of history. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit more, what it means to really have a pessimistic view of history.
Gourevitch: Well, Richard’s getting me in trouble for that just because—it was in an email—I didn’t publish that.
Locke: That’s true. Forget it.
Gourevitch: No, it’s true. Yes, I suppose evil is often described as being inside one and therefore that that’s part of it’s danger or risk. What I meant is that it’s a kind of disembodied force, that it is something for which we are not individually responsible, but something by which we are possessed. And it’s the sense of possession that gave me a sense of something external. That’s really what I meant. Whether the possession is internal or external, it’s in a sense impervious to any kind of choices or decisions or actions or political structures or social organizations through which it’s exercised. And that people have a capability for terrible behavior and for great inhumanity, as well as, to some extent, in differing degrees in different people, great acts of humanity and nobility and so forth, that I think is true.
But I don’t think of these things as beyond us. And even if it’s inside you, it sounds odd, usually, when people describe it as something from within, as a force, as evil, as opposed to just a capability of some kind. Which, if people say people have a capacity for evil, fine. I wouldn’t argue with the word at that point. My pessimistic view of history I suppose simply means that I don’t see us on a great trajectory of the world improving steadily in its lot. Now, I’ve been corrected by various people. My wife points out that the world for women has improved greatly, at least from a medical, and largely from a social and political point of view in the last hundred years—those kinds of improvements, absolutely. But the overall fate of the species, I don’t simply think—there are a lot of people who look at trouble in the world with the idea, well, we’ve just gotta figure out what went wrong and fix it.
What are the lessons of Rwanda? I cannot tell you how many ‘lessons learned’ sessions have been held in international organizations and by humanitarian groups and this and that over the million dead in Rwanda. And I’m not sure that the lessons they’re teaching have been learned, which is that we’ve got to act quicker on this, there’s got to be more political will in there, you know—this that and the other thing. And if we just had the trucks there in time, and so forth. And to me that’s not the lesson of Rwanda. To me, the lesson of Rwanda is that people who depend on the outside world for their protection, if they’re in real danger, they stand unprotected. Perhaps it is something about political organization that leads to that, and the way that people are prepared to take part in that. Perhaps it is that—far from being something we will not see again because we once saw it clearly, this is something more like a disease—I’ve thought of it sometimes medically.
If a disease occurs, a new disease, a new affliction occurs to the body, medical science does not say, “well, now that we’ve seen that and had a good look at it and understood its causes, we’re done with it.” They think, wow, we’re gonna face epidemic outbreaks of this thing all over the place. We’re stuck with this thing. It’s gonna erupt left, right, and center. It’s gonna mutate. It’s gonna come back at us by violence, cunning, and everything else at different angles, and we’ve got to figure out how to be on our toes to watch out for it. And the notion that we have in the nice stories, as you said earlier, that you can just immunize yourself by good will, seems to me actually to put us in greater danger. Therefore I’m not overly pessimistic, but I’m very cheerful.
Locke: Yes, Akeel.
Akeel Bilgrami: I agree with you that evil doesn’t help you in contemplating these things. But one of the things that makes it so distinct as a force, even if you describe it as a force, is that in the Western literary tradition, ever since Milton’s Satan, evilness is not just a force that is the opposite of good, but it is supposed to oppose the good because it is good. So it’s not just a stark contrast with the good, but it opposes the good precisely because it is the good. And in Bush’s government’s self-serving use of the word evil to call various people evil, that’s precisely what they had in mind, that they oppose us because we’ve got our freedoms and so on. So it is a force, but it’s got a very specific resonance in our literary understanding of it. It’s a religious notion with a very specific force.
Gourevitch: That’s true. And I think you’re absolutely right that it was hijacked and abused in the administration’s rhetoric about evil-doers, and so forth, but perhaps that’s part of what makes me shy away from it as a word in my own work. None of the things that I’ve written about or the characters feel like they achieve the quality of Miltonian evil, or an Ahab. These sort of petty thugs of Hutu power in Rwanda who managed to create some pretty grandiose destruction were no Ahabs, were no Milton’s devil, or Satan. They were not up to that order of things. They really are in that tradition talking about cosmic forces, and yes they are opposed to good, as they say.
And maybe people didn’t fully hear the question, but the point was that in the literary tradition from Milton onward, the idea of evil is opposed to good because it’s good. That part of the idea of an evil force or an evil character is not just that it’s the antithesis of good, but that it is opposed to that which is good because it’s good. And I just don’t see that the kind of vile behavior that we’ve seen rates that high, and I think therefore the word’s been diluted and weakened to a degree that even if we ran into the real thing, we’d need to come up with a new way of putting it, sometimes by a few simple words.
Locke: There’s also kind of gleeful, lurid theatricality about the term evil that also affords a refuge from really having to do anything more than just appreciate its sheer exuberance.
Gourevitch: Yeah. It’s a word that’s kind of too good to—
Locke: To waste.
Gourevitch: Yeah.
Question 2: How do you think history, or the future, will regard the policy makers, the people who actually wrote the policies that went into Abu Ghraib? It seems to me that one of the problems is that it’s been very difficult to accept that these policies and strategies are as bad as they seem. It seems like we would rather assume there’s some rationale for them, and they’re really not as horrible as they seem. But do you think that it will come to light that they are, or won’t because of the context?
Gourevitch: Well, there’s been a lot of documentation of how bad these policies are, how they came about, how they’ve been structured, how they came out of the Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal shop, and the justice department, primarily under Gonzales. Ashcroft seems to have had some problems with all of this, which might be why he didn’t get a second term. No, seriously. And Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. More and more and more memos. There were actually considerable legal debates about all of this, and there were of course people who dissented, or objected, or who dug in for the way things have always been, or used to be, who lost. And some of them have been great leakers. I actually thank the leakers in my acknowledgment because I think democracies to some extent depend on them, especially at a time when leaking becomes the crime.
Rumsfeld’s outburst in response to the Abu Ghraib photographs, “These illegal photographs, which were illegally passed around!” That was the thing. You look for the leak. You don’t correct the policy. The combination of lawyers and the policing of people who leak tells you that this is very deliberate. How will history look at the people who authored these things? I think dimly. There are people who argue much more than I do that they will be brought to trial. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe they’ll be brought to trial because I think part of what’s broken is the extent to which, once you’re at a certain level of power, you are beyond a certain kind of accountability. You could be brought to trial for having a mistress, and you could be brought to trial for tax evasion, you can be brought to trial for bribery. But you cannot be brought to trial for mass political crimes. That’s called policy, and nobody wants to do that. Nobody has the courage to do it.
You had Watergate, was about a burglary. You had the impeachment of Clinton for supposedly lying about his sex life. Basically, they were both—these were minor crimes compared to the larger crimes certainly that have been committed in this case. But I do not see that happening. There’s talk about, oh, well, the international legal order will kick in, and they’ll get Rumsfeld when he’s traveling in Belgium, or something. You know, they tried that, and I think the Americans sent some sort of a signal that it would be unfortunate for Belgium if we withdrew NATO headquarters, and that law didn’t hold up so well. These guys may not be able to travel quite as freely for a little while. I don’t know if Kissinger can’t go some places. But it doesn’t seem to restrict them very much. And I don’t see that happening. And I think that what’s most important is that one actually attempts to recriminalize some of the things that have been decriminalized. One tries to reinstitute some of the policies and training that for years have been at the core of American military doctrine.
One reasserts, to use another abused word like evil, values that have been at the core of these things. And frankly some of the most fierce outrage and objection to what happened at Abu Ghraib was from within the military. I’ve had notes from military people who sign or who have these military email addresses who say, those guys up the chain of command should be completely held to account. Because they feel that their whole profession has been dishonored. And they don’t feel that this is what they’ve served and how they’ve served. And they don’t see how you can actually win a war on terror that of course has to also be an international struggle for global opinion and instead is taking the form of this kind of nonsense.
When you see an administration lawyer up like this to break the law, it’s very different from when you just see people here and there taking a little bit of executive leeway to do something dark and dirty. They’re creating a totally new structure. They are trying to dismantle the legal framework of the Geneva Conventions, of the international laws, of American military doctrine, all of these things. And what worries me is that always in this administration the lawyers who have been the masterminds are great advocates of expanded executive power. That legal theory is held by relatively few theorists, but they’re in the right positions these last eight years. In tandem with the physical abuse that they advocated for the ordinary soldier, was the idea of a President who is basically unchecked by the law, has supreme executive power in wartime. A kind of idealized notion of a wartime executive, and I find that what worries me is that it’s very hard once you’ve loosened up executive power to put it back in the bottle. And I don’t see anybody running for office suggesting that that’s what they’d like to do.
It was very interesting that when, in the primary, Hillary Clinton was for domestic wiretapping, and Obama was against it. And obviously Hillary Clinton thought she was going to be in the White House, where she would want her executive power unchecked. And as soon as she lost the primary, and the vote came up for renewal of domestic eavesdropping, she voted against it, because now she’s a legislator, and a legislator wants legislative power to check executive power. And Obama, who’d always been against it, suddenly took a pass on it. Which I think is one of the real strikes against him. It makes one very worried, honestly. That doesn’t mean one isn’t much more worried about the alternative. But it’s important when one thinks, like, we’ll go vote for Obama, and the world will suddenly change into this wonderful happy place where all the problems of the last eight years will no longer be our heritage and our responsibility. No. I don’t see anybody planning to get the job at the White House and roll back executive power. And so that’s actually something that the framers and the founders and centuries have held in place against considerable pressure not to. And it’s broken at other times. Lincoln broke it. Others have broken it. One has to seek it back. That’s the best one can do. And I think history will judge this very, very harshly.
Question 3: I really enjoyed your book, and I’d like you to talk a little bit about the role of technology, from two aspects. One being the idea of sort of a distancing from responsibility. You have the quote of the one woman who says, well, she documents it, and it sort of distances her. And I think any reasonable person would think, oh, if I take pictures of this and show it to my superiors and people back home, someone will stop it. And the other is the idea of the war for hearts and minds being a war of media. In some ways the people in Abu Ghraib understood that better. Their pictures and videos counter the beheading videos much better than anything that we could produce.
Gourevitch: Well, unfortunately the sequence was the other way around. The beheading videos followed the release of the Abu Ghraib videos, and the Abu Ghraib soldiers were suddenly blamed for the beheading of Americans, as well, especially when Nick Berg’s body was dumped at the gates of Abu Ghraib, beheaded, and it was said that this was revenge for that. Many of the crimes of the war, I mean, many of the escalations of the war in the next months were blamed on these soldiers, as if it was these soldiers who’d done it. But the role of technology, it’s a huge subject obviously. There’s an essay I love by Mark Twain that he wrote in 1903, during the whole period when the human rights movement was getting started. It was very focused on Congo and the abuses of Leopold, King of the Belgians, in the Congo, which he ran as his own turf. If you’ve ever read Adam Hochschild’s book, he goes into great detail. And people were cutting off the hands of these workers at the rubber plantations when they didn’t meet quota, and millions of people were being killed, and the society was being torn asunder. There was a lot of pamphleteering, and the whole rise of the modern human rights movement is built around this Congo protest movement in the late 1890s and so on.
So Mark Twain, he contributed a pamphlet to this, and his pamphlet took the form of King Leopold’s soliloquy, in which King Leopold sits on a throne, and he’s surrounded by pamphlets of protest literature. And he picks them up and reads them, and he’s like, “Ah, look at this! They say that all the skeletons, finger to finger, would wrap three times around the world from what I’ve caused, and they say this,” and he reads all these atrocities off, and he sort of scoffs at them. As if written by Shaw, he’s kind of a delighted maniac. And he keeps saying, “But it doesn’t matter! This is just a bunch of little whiners! We control all of the presses. We control all of the pulpits. We have never had any problem suppressing this nonsense and going on with our looting.”
And then, after a rather long soliloquy, he opens a pamphlet and he says, “Damn, the Kodak! The uncorruptible Kodak! The only witness I ever found that cannot be bought off or silenced.” And there’s a sheet of photographs of these people whose hands have been cut off. And right then, in 1896 or something, Kodak had created it’s first small, portable camera, the predecessor of the Brownie box, and people were able to carry them around. And he said, you know, we just can’t silence a photograph. Now, this is long before people figured out how to silence photographs very successfully in King Leopold’s role. And we have much more skilled King Leopolds these days. It’s really interesting that in 2003, right as this war was breaking out, if you look back at advertising supplements even, 2002 was the advent of the cheap, portable digital camera, and everybody went to war with them. And with it came a culture that is alien to the rest of us, which happens for reasons that I can’t quite figure out the technological link, but also involves a great deal of exhibitionism, right?
The idea that you constantly document yourself doing everything, and that you pass that around to all of your friends, and that you don’t really think about the fact that a photograph that is electronic can be passed infinitely, but that’s just part of what’s strange and cool about it. And people who sort of flick through their photo albums where they have a puppy, and somebody having sex, and a beheading, and a fire down the road, and they’re like, it’s all kind of equal and cool. Cool, weird photograph. Wicked. There was a site that was run out of Florida where soldiers used to send their most shocking photographs from the war. A lot of them were somewhat pornographic, them posing, especially now that you also have a sexually mixed army. People posing on military equipment or on battlefields. A lot of it was battlefield horror. And it was called thatsfuckedup.com.
That was the name of the site. And people put these up like, “man, if you think about it, that’s messed-up.” Man, look at this messed-up picture. So this all was in play. The extent to which taking pictures of yourself was a kind of relief and distancing and at the same time was a kind of documentation and proof. Graner and Harman, who took a lot of the pictures, both talk of it with very different ideas of what that means as proof. As some proof that it was what they were supposed to do. The soldiers thought that the photographs that they were taking would show that they were doing what they were supposed to do. In some way, even if they thought that they were also pushing the envelope, and even if they were staging some of the photographs to shock and sensationalize and play Cindy Sherman, they were also doing that. And the interesting thing is, at the end, where did the photographs come to us from? From the soldiers’ families. The soldiers were segregated, locked away when the photographs came to the command structure’s eyes in January of 2004. And then they faced this problem.
If we bring them to trial, we have to release the photographs. We do not want to release the photographs because they will be a great public relations disaster for the Army and for America, so we cannot charge them and bring them to trial. And so they held them. And they thought, but if these photographs get out, we’ve got to have these guys held and pending charges. So they had the charges all leveled. I remember when the photographs came out, the big story was, “The Army’s taking care of it. We’re on the case. We’ve got them charged. They’re awaiting trial.” And they railroaded this guy who hadn’t even done anything, Jeremy Sivits, gave him a year in jail. He had actually saved a bunch of people from being beaten worse on the night of the human pyramid, so they put him in jail for a year because he was the most defenseless of the bunch. Those photographs were leaked by the family of the soldiers when they were saying, our guys are being segregated and getting prepared for some kind of framing, and nobody is getting access to them. There is something messed up here. We’re gonna get these pictures up to show that it’s a larger story. And boom, they got them out into the hands of our King Leopold’s master framers, who said, there it is, it is in the photograph, it is all you need to know. Bingo. Those are your villains.
And so technology is huge. The other thing they did is they sent people out trying to recover all the photographs. They actually sent out Criminal Investigative Division agents of the military and knocked on the doors in America of family members, lovers, friends, etc., of the soldiers who had had these photographs at Abu Ghraib. Knocked on their doors and asked for their hard drives. Which is illegal. It’s sort of legal, but you’re not required to give it up. They didn’t understand digital photography. They thought they could get them all back. And then they started to realize at some point that this is some sort of viral thing. We can’t control it. That was their concern was: to suppress the photographs, not the behavior or the policy.