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Standard Operating Procedure | 
 enlarge | Authors: Philip Gourevitch, Errol Morris
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 21011
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 1594201323
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.704437
EAN: 9781594201325
ASIN: 1594201323
Publication Date: April 3, 2008
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Product Description
An utterly original literary and intellectual collaboration by two of our keenest moral and political observers has produced a nonfiction Heart of Darkness for our time: the first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib prison, based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with the Americans involved.
Standard Operating Procedure reveals the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the iconic photographs of the Iraq war-the haunting digital snapshots from Abu Ghraib prison that shocked the world-and simultaneously illuminates and alters forever our understanding of those images and the events they depict. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris's startlingly frank and intimate interviews with Americans who served at Abu Ghraib and with some of their Iraqi prisoners, as well as on his own research, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising account of Iraq's occupation from the inside out-rendering vivid portraits of guards and prisoners ensnared in an appalling breakdown of command authority and moral order.
What did we think we saw in the infamous photographs, and what were we, in fact, looking at? What did the people in the photographs think they were doing, and why did they take them? What was "standard operating procedure" and what was "being creative" when it came to making prisoners uncomfortable? Who was giving orders, and who was following them? Where does the line lie between humiliation and torture, and why and how does that matter? Was the true Abu Ghraib "scandal" a result of an expos or a cover-up?
In exploring these questions, Gourevitch and Morris have crafted a nonfiction morality play that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines. By taking us deep into the voices and characters of the men and women who lived the horror of Abu Ghraib, the authors force us, whatever our politics, to reexamine the pat explanations in which we have been offered-or sought-refuge, and to see afresh this watershed episode. Instead of a "few bad apples," we are confronted with disturbingly ordinary young American men and women who have been dropped into something out of Dante's Inferno.
Standard Operating Procedure is a book that makes you think and makes you see-an essential contribution from two of our finest nonfiction artists working at the peak of their powers.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 4 more reviews...
 An Important Book To Read and Digest September 22, 2008
142 out of 143 found this review helpful
While the general public in this country is somewhat knowledgeable of the prolonged agonies of the ongoing Iraq War, few of us are as acutely aware of the dark cloud of atrocities accompanying that war. Information about the 'progress' and purpose of that war are parceled out by the somewhat restricted media, the more serious and sad aspects of what is actually happening are scrutinized before the media releases that information, leaving us with a generalized anxiety about conditions and prognostications of the conflict that has so little support from the public at present. Too often this 'protective shield' from the facts allows a certain degree of near complacency, and it takes the intermittent release of data such as the unveiling of the atrocities and prisoner abuse at the hands of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison that surfaced through blogs and magazines and newspapers to startle the public and remind us of the grim aspects that war can drive countries and individuals to perform. Yes, similar startle reaction accompanied the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and the books and films that followed that event alerted the public of the realities that can happen in wartime. But it takes an important book such as STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE written by Philip Gourevitch with invaluable insights and interviews from co-author Errol Morris who created the film STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE to bring to our careful scrutiny just what is happening and what is possible under the guise of 'protection' in time of war.
Gourevitch wisely divides this book into three sections - 'Before', 'During' and 'After; - which allows the reader to absorb the events leading up to the creation of the Abu Ghraib prison, introducing the people involved in transforming this dank and pungent edifice housing Saddam Hussein's own grim prison and execution house into a 'redesigned' American prison. We meet the contractors, the military personnel from the officers down to the soldiers assigned to guard the detainee prisoners, to the prisoners themselves, and it is this thorough approach to reportage that engenders confidence in the writing and makes every riveting page of this immensely important and terrifying account sear the reader's eye. Photographs, such as those that flooded the blogsites and media for a brief moment a few years ago, can create a visceral impression, but Gourevitch's choice to exclude the visuals from his evaluation of Abu Ghraib and the inhumane atrocities perpetrated by our own soldiers on the prisoners makes his book even more disturbing.
The use of letters home by the soldiers witnessing and taking part in the torture and 'interrogation techniques', letters and interviews supplied by Errol Morris from his research for his documentary film, allow us to hear about the situation first hand. Gourevitch is careful not to press his thumb on the scales that weigh the balance of 'indicated' and 'not indicated' actions and his doing so makes the reading all the more vivid. He allows us to observe how the situation arose, what actually happened there, and the repercussions and cover-up of the full story once the activities within the walls of that now infamous prison leaked out. This is a book that should be read by all citizens of this country (and of all countries who engage in war) to remind us all just how distorted and tested the state of humanity can become when the umbrella of 'war' alters human behavior that at times only retrospection (such as this book supplies) unveils. STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE is an important document and a fascinating, if grim, read. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, September 08
 Charlie Foxtrot: Staring "Leash Girl" & "Sh_tboy" August 27, 2008
Wow, where do I start ? Let see, maybe the camera rule should be more strictly enforced, I mean talk about feeding the fire. Lets see: sell my soul to the devil, who is the devil ? "Your going to screw up your life anyway, so why not let us do it for you (we'll do a much better job of it)". When a fire burns, it can hurt, it can maim, it can kill, but when it goes out , it's gone, it's finished, it's over. I gave the book 4 stars because it should have been at least 100 pages longer.
gut wrenching look at Abu Ghraib.. August 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A straight forward look at Abu Ghraib. This book is intense, hard-hitting and to be quite honest very difficult to read. It is very thought provoking and really makes one wonder, what has become of us and what has this war on terror led us to? It is a war that we must win at all costs and this book makes us look at the costs. And it is difficult to accept that this is where we've come. One section of the book talks about how George Washington treated Hessian prisoners of war so well in the American Revolution that many eventually moved to America after the war. We have come a long way. It is thankfully a fast read of a book, it is gut-wrenching to read and to really find out what was going on at Abu Ghraib. The book starts with a very brief background of Abu Ghraib(BEFORE) and some of the horrors that took place there under Saddam Hussein and quickly moves to how and why America used Abu Ghraib. Then the bulk of the book (DURING) details the timeline and events that led to the pictures that are seared in our minds. A brief wrapup (AFTER) concludes the book. Note while there are no pictures or graphs or maps of any kind in the book I found it to be more intense because of this. A simple explanation will trigger the picture in your mind. I never spent a whole lot of time examining the now infamous pictures but the images were so clearly invoked in my mind when reading passages of what was going on. The author so clearly states the power of an image and while that image can not tell the whole story it certainly reveals a story of it's own. SOP tells the whole story and if you think this is all because of a couple renegade, out-of-control soldiers then you need to read this book.
Frankly, by the time I was finished I didn't know who to blame or point a finger at. I just felt alot of sadness and despair and disgust.
What the Photographs Don't Show August 5, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As much as the Bush administration would like to have the main photo image of the war in Iraq be the pulling down of Saddam's statue during the initial invasion, the most famous photograph of the war is quite different. It is of a skinny figure, hooded, standing on a box, arms raised and fingers attached to electrical cables. It and the other shocking images from the prison at Abu Ghraib revealed a callous disregard for the rights of prisoners and for basic human rights, and an acceptance of torture as a means for the soldiers in charge of prisoners to soften them up for questioning. The pictures tell a shocking story, but not the whole story; this is the point of _Standard Operating Procedure_ (The Penguin Press) by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. The book was written by Gourevitch, but it comes from conversations with Morris, who had conducted interviews, evaluated pictures, and studied records for his documentary film with the same name as the book. Tellingly, the book has no photographs. Not only are the images available in lots of other places, and not only are they sadly familiar to us all; the book shows that much of what was important at Abu Ghraib was never photographed, and that some of the photos distorted the real story.
There were at one time 5,000 prisoners (actually called "security detainees" to keep them from the legal protection that prisoners might get) in the prison, which was designed to hold 2,500 and certainly no more than 4,000. The military has since determined that three quarters of the inmates were not guilty of any crime; most of them were simply picked up in broad sweeps by the military police. The financing and the manning of the prison was botched. The military took over from the Justice Department later in 2003, and the soldiers assigned there simply did not know what they were doing. They were combat Military Policemen, used to being heavily armed to support front-line operations; they were not the MPs who are trained to be guards, including training in such things as the Geneva Conventions. When the incoming guards were told that their mission was to support Military Intelligence in their quest to get all the information they could from the prisoners, the guards didn't know better. Since the prisoners were not classed as prisoners of war, and since there were no rules to cover how they were to be treated, the guards made up what to do as they went along, including intimidation with dogs, the famous mock-electrocutions, and the pyramids of naked prisoners with grinning American soldiers in the foreground. One guard had sufficient understanding to write home that the prisoners weren't terrorists but because of Abu Ghraib would be the terrorists of the future. When the photos leaked to the outside world, the outrage resulted in some of the soldiers getting long sentences, but exactly zero senior officers were found guilty of serious malpractice. Think about this: There was a prisoner who was beaten to death within the prison (no, the techniques used were not just humiliation). A guard took photos of his corpse, and got six months in jail. The men who beat him to death never got charged.
Such imbalance shows the distorted opinions and actions that can come from these horrid photos. It is probably true that the abuse in Abu Ghraib (and its incalculable damage of infamy upon our nation) would not have come to light had the photographs not existed. They made the crimes depicted sensational and they provoked instantaneous indignation in any viewer (except those predisposed to think that the hilarity depicted was something you might see at a typical fraternity house). Gourevitch and Morris, however, remind us that every picture tells a story, but none of them tell the full story. Every picture shows abuse by low-ranking soldiers, and no picture shows the command or the administration that was responsible for the confusion and lack of discipline that allowed the abuse to occur. No picture shows how a few of the soldiers were real sadists, but most were doing a job and carrying on what the group reinforced. No picture shows that most of the detainees were innocent, and no picture shows the children that were also detained as a matter of pressuring their prisoner parents. No picture shows prisoners being beaten to death. The larger story, what the pictures cannot tell, is what this astonishing, distressing book brings. There is little polemic here, although one could not tell this story without some disgust. The resounding question is one that ends one of the book's chapters: "If you fight terror with terror, how can you tell which is which?"
Devastating Book July 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A devastating book, both in its depiction of genuinely rancid individual behavior in an awful time and place and the ways in which those in charge promoted said behavior in a myriad of ways (from the tone created by George W. Bush's Iraqi War rhetoric, which filtered its way to every level of the military, to ghost-like military interrogators who freely moved in and out of Abu Ghraib and who made it known they wanted the prisoners softened up to the seemingly endless run of mid-level soldiers who knew what was going on and gave implicit permission by not only not complaining, but by not even reacting to (pick one) naked men on leashes, pyramids of naked humanity, men beaten, intimidated by dogs, forced to crawl through filth, men who soiled themselves, men who bled and died). What's most impressive is the subtlety of Gourevitch's approach here, he gets a lot of mileage out of the distance between the behavior of the people involved in taking the infamous photographs and what they say now of the incidents. He never overtly addresses this dichotomy but it hangs over much of the book and it's a complex brew of rationalization, hubris, self-justification of truly odious, inhuman behavior, and genuine sadness and regret over what they'd done. The book paints the whole "one bad apple" notion as impossibly simplistic and self-righteous, not just by laying out the case for explicit and implicit orders from above, but by laying bare the involved soldiers' fears and confusions, their inability to figure out where the morality line resides. How do young men and women trained to do exactly what they're told figure out when some imaginary line is crossed and even if they do, how do they do something about it in the face of a military bureaucracy that is wink winking its way past the torture?
And though judicious in his overt analysis of the situation, Gourevitch writes some startlingly good passages. He carefully lays out the case for why Bush/Cheney and gang invaded Iraq in the first place and not because of phantom WMDs, but because of a belief in the inherent superiority of our cultural mindset. We are the remaining superpower, America stands for all things right and true, for the collective freedom of man - for democracy and doing the right thing - and we were going to bring these values to a morally compromised backwater. And by doing so, Gourevitch makes the case for Abu Ghraib as THE central metaphor for the whole awful enterprise, a place where every instinct, both personal and collective, turns out to be not just wrong, but morally, criminally so. Near the end of the book he writes about a prisoner known as AQ (an Iraqi believed, wrongly it turned out - this comes up again and again, how often the tortured turned out to be regular Iraqis picked up in large sweeps -- to be Al Queda) being terrorized by dogs, "It does not seem possible to amplify the drama of this moment, but the look on AQ's face does just that. He has the horrified, drawn-back, and quivering expression of a thoroughly blasted soul." Gourevitch ends this paragraph with this, "The pictures of AQ on that night before New Year's Eve are the last known photographs of our prisoners on the MI block at Abu Ghraib, which seems fitting, because these pictures don't leave much to the viewer's imagination, except the obvious question: if you fight terror with terror, how can you tell which is which."
And then there's this, which is to my mind the central passage of the entire book: "So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq war that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had help up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine - not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideas had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing. It was our image versus the enemy's, a standard, in this case, by which it was easy to stoop appallingly low before being caught out. The Abu Ghraib photographs caught us out."
Thus does Abu Ghraib come to seem the ultimate representation of the Bush/Cheney approach to the war, an approach based on an abstraction and a belief that they were doing 'the right thing.'
This is an important book and one that I think will over time come to be one of THE central books of this war. Gourevitch's interpretations of what the photographs show and what they don't (the easy ways in which photos can deceive us) pushes it into a literary realm that few books like this approach and comes to make the whole idea of objective truth seem a part of the problem.
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