Standard operating procedure /

Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris collaborate to tell the story of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. AFTER the abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib was exposed in April 2004 by The New Yorker and "60 Minutes," the Bush administration sought to portray the reprehensible misconduct as the work of a few bad apples. Seeming to underscore that verdict was the fact that soldiers took pictures of themselves, smiling, holding thumbs up, with the naked, dead, abused and humiliated prisoners. Unfortunately, the truth, which emerges with painful clarity from "Standard Operating Procedure," is that what happened at Abu Ghraib was not only tolerated but condoned and encouraged. Harsh treatment wasn't punished; it was rewarded. When First Lt. Carolyn Wood of the Army was in charge of the interrogation center at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan in 2003, she established a policy that allowed prisoners to be held in solitary confinement for a month, to be stripped, shackled in painful positions, kept without sleep, bombarded with sound and light. Three prisoners were beaten to death on her watch. She was awarded a Bronze Star, one of the armed forces' highest combat medals, promoted to captain and sent to Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, a Marine Corps lawyer and an Army lawyer witnessed prisoners being suspended from their cell doors. Occasionally they expressed mild concern, but over all they said nothing, which was taken as "implied consent." When a prisoner interrogated by the C.I.A. died from the beatings, a "parade of senior officers" viewed the corpse. Army medics cleaned up the body, and the official reason given for the death was a heart attack. A scene from the documentary film "Standard Operating Procedure." Sometimes just for fun, Cpl. Charles Graner and other guards hauled prisoners out of their cells, stripped them, punched them, put sandbags over their heads and forced them to masturbate. Soldiers gleefully snapped photographs. Pfc. Lynndie England, whose name along with that of Cpl. Graner became almost synonymous with Abu Ghraib, said "it was standard operating procedure." Specialists Sabrina Harman and Megan Ambuhl later thought that perhaps the soldiers had gone too far. They reported what had gone on to a sergeant. "Nothing really happened," said Harman, whose letters to her partner were given to the authors, and whose personal story adds to the power of this book. Graner himself showed photographs he had taken to senior officers, including a lieutenant colonel. Nothing happened. "Standard Operating Procedure" and a documentary film of the same name are the collaborative effort of Philip Gourevitch, the author of a highly acclaimed book about the Rwandan genocide, and Errol Morris, the filmmaker whose credits include "The Fog of War," the Academy Award-winning documentary about the former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, and "The Thin Blue Line," which succeeded in getting a man off death row. For the documentary, Morris taped interviews with a score of soldiers and civilians, several of whom witnessed the abuse or participated in it. Some of the interviews are, of course, self-serving, but many of the individuals appear to be deeply troubled by what went on at Abu Ghraib. The interviews ran to about two and a half million words, and Gourevitch has woven excerpts, along with transcripts from military investigations and trials, into a tightly knit and damning narrative. The authors do themselves and their readers a disservice, however, by failing to provide detailed notes or an index. It is not always clear whether their information comes from the interviews, from the military investigations, from sworn court statements or even from other journalists. And recently Morris acknowledged that he paid some of the people he interviewed, without saying whom. Still, this is one of the most devastating of the many books on Iraq. The Justice Department sent only four men to set up a corrections system in Iraq, in May 2003, and two left quickly in frustration, leaving Lane McCotter, who had made a career running military and civilian prisons, and Gary Deland, who had worked with McCotter in Utah. "We were going to make it into a model prison," McCotter said. Deland established a police academy, where he fired any recruit found to be taking bribes. But the men had neither the time nor the resources to carry out their mission. A four-month assessment period was shortened to 30 days. They concluded that Iraq needed 75,000 prison beds. Fewer than 3,000 were provided, and civilian and military prisoners were held together, in violation of Army doctrine and the Geneva Conventions. Many were innocent, picked up in sweeps, guilty of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Deland said. Later in 2003, the American military took over running the prisons. The job was given to combat units of the military police. "We had no training, we were vastly outnumbered and we were given lots of responsibilities that we didn't have any knowledge about how to carry out," said Specialist Ambuhl, who was one of only seven M.P.'s assigned to cell blocks housing more than 1,000 prisoners. "They couldn't say that we broke the rules because there were no rules," she said. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller had commanded the prison at Guantánamo before coming to Iraq. Breaking with Army doctrine, but following the procedure he had established at Guantánamo, he put the military police, who normally run military prisons, at the service of the interrogators, military, C.I.A. and civilian contractors. The guards must "be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees," Miller wrote. "You're treating the prisoners too well," he told the guards. "You have to treat the prisoners like dogs." But the military's dogs were treated better and, as is now well known, were used to frighten the prisoners - exploit their phobias, in the Pentagon's euphemistic jargon. Two dog handlers "had an ongoing contest to see which of them could make the most prisoners piss in fear." Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian interrogator known as Big Steve, ordered the dogs to be used on a prisoner nicknamed A. Q., because he was thought to be an Al Qaeda operative. One picture shows the man, his arms tied behind him, cowering against the wall, the snarling dog's teeth inches away. "He would tell us to put A. Q. in this position or that position, then put the dogs on him," Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick said. "Then he would tell them to pull the dogs off, then he would go in the cell, shut the door and I guess interrogate him." After several months of torturing A. Q. with "dogs and bondage and hooding and noise and sleeplessness and heat and cold," the authorities realized that he had no connection to Al Qaeda or any criminal activity, and he was released. One of the lingering questions has been the degree of complicity within the Pentagon and White House in what happened at Abu Ghraib. No "smoking gun" linking the abuses to Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or George W. Bush has ever been found, and it is unlikely that one will be. But it isn't needed, the authors say. "Abu Ghraib was the smoking gun." What occurred at Abu Ghraib is deeply disturbing, and Americans, individually and collectively, need to ask, How could this have happened? How could our sons and daughters, good kids from Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, engage in this conduct? How could so many have looked the other way? What happened at Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples - of Lynndie England or Charles Graner or Ivan Frederick or Megan Ambuhl or Sabrina Harman, all of whom were eventually court-martialed on various charges. (Only one senior officer was court-martialed, and he was found not guilty.) "The stain is ours," Gourevitch and Morris write. It is hard to come away from their book with any other conclusion. Raymond Bonner is a Times correspondent, currently living in London.

Here, author and journalist Gourevitch and documentary filmmaker Morris have compiled the complete story of Abu Ghraib, from Iraqi prison to prison of occupying American forces, and the crimes its walls concealed--only some of which were revealed in photographs that hit the global media in 2003. Drawing from Morris¿s lengthy interviews with the soldiers who photographed and participated in prisoner abuse, the authors render in clear detail the horror and inhumanity of Abu Ghraib, for prisoner and guard alike: "Inexperienced, untrained, under attack, and under orders to do wrong, the low-ranking reservist MPs who implemented the nefarious policy... knew that what they were doing was immoral, and they knew that if it wasn't illegal, it ought to be." From the squalid conditions to the lack of regulations to the appalling acts that jolted the world, this chronicle of unconscionable behavior, and the political maneuvering that took place in its aftermath, is as much a page-turner as any fictional thriller. Companion to Morris¿s documentary film of the same name, this deft piece of reportage will stir readers¿ anger, at both the actions and the consequences; not only was the torture purposeless ("Nobody has even bothered to pretend otherwise"), but "no soldier above the rank of sergeant ever served jail time... [and] Nobody was ever charged with torture, or war crimes, or any violation of the Geneva Conventions." A thorough, terrifying account of an American-made "bedlam," the latest from Gourevitch is as troubling, and arguably as important, as his 1998 Rwanda investigation We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families. (May) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.