The legal state of exception used to permit violence against prisoners in Abu Ghraib is indivisible from the spatial dimension of the exception. As a concentrationary spatial manifestation of the state of exception, Abu Ghraib clearly corresponds to the topological structure of exception. As a site that connects most of the elements of torture in the GWOT – operating under extended Guantánamo rules, receiving rendered subjects, operating at least partially as a black site – it can operate as a prism through which it can be observed that much GWOT torture policy operated as though the state of exception was the rule. In Gourevitch’s text, Javal Davis describes the squalor of “Saddam’s old penal colony” – the five under-resourced, understaffed, overpopulated prison complexes that comprised Abu Ghraib – as “like one of those Hitler things almost.”82 Not just a prison, Abu Ghraib functioned as a camp in the full sense of Agamben’s description. What Standard Operating
Procedure observes, following Benjamin’s observation in his eighth thesis on the philosophy
of history, is that the exception, rather than a temporary withdrawal of the law, became the rule.83
The spatiality and legality of the exception are, in turn, indivisible from the reduction of enemies to bare life. Javal Davis relates in the film how American patrols would often “go out in the middle of the night and sweep up every single fighting age male and lock them all up. [...] Imagine someone coming to your town and taking all the men in it.” In a clear echo of the round-ups of the Holocaust and the dragnet interrogations of Algeria, Davis tells how prisoners “would come in like on cattle trucks, like cattle. [...] They’re, like, taxi cab drivers
82
Gourevitch & Morris, Standard Operating Procedure, p. 15 & p. 78.
83 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt
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and welders, bakers, and they’re at Abu Ghraib.” The majority of the prison population was constituted of innocent people detained indefinitely in squalid conditions. Patrick Cockburn observes that private contractors and US soldiers “had immunity if they killed Iraqis”, and it can be further observed in the arbitrary arrest of huge swathes of the population that everyday Iraqis were what Butler would call an ungrievable population, against whom the Americans could offend with impunity.84 Although the entirety of Abu Ghraib was a zone of legal indistinction, however, it was the hard site, reserved for prisoners deemed (rightly or wrongly) to be directly relevant to the insurgency and where the photographs were taken, where the state of exception was most concretely located. Agamben observes in “Beyond Human Rights” (1996) that “[w]hen their rights are no longer the rights of the citizen, that is when human beings are truly sacred, in the sense that this term used to have in the Roman law of the archaic period: doomed to death.”85
As Agamben reminds us, the Nazis used the term “entwürdigen, literally to ‘deprive of dignity’” to describe this process of removal from the protections of the law that is simultaneously an exposure to the force of law.86 Again we observe the removal of the protections of citizenship being instrumentalised in order to make populations available to disciplinary torture violence.
As discussed above, in the political discourse of the early GWOT the suspicion of involvement in terrorism was deemed to merit complete removal from the human and political community, and it is in the figures of the rendered terrorist suspects who in Abu Ghraib were known as Ghost Detainees, or OGA prisoners, that this removal is most complete. Javal Davis, again, is strikingly clear on this point.
They had no rules. We called them the ghosts because they come in and you don’t know who they are. Whoever their prisoners were, you never logged them. ‘How’s it going there soldier. Here’s this guy, don’t log him in the book. He’s not here, hasn’t been here, just put him in a cell in here and don’t mark it. When the Red Cross comes, move them to another place. When the Red Cross go to the other place, move them back to where they were. They don’t exist here.’
84 Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London & New York: Verso, 2006), p. 176. 85 Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights”, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. by Vincenzo
Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2000 [1996]), p. 22.
86 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen
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The hard site was a place in which OGA prisoners did not exist; their presence in the black site was their removal from any political community and from the legal protections of the law. The hard site operated as a black site, a node in the GWOT’s concentrationary network of secret prisons, and it is of great value that Standard Operating Procedure reveals this; However, the viewpoint of the prisoners is a conspicuous absence in the film. The exclusion of victim testimony is perhaps understandable because of the tightly delimited territory the film covers, but it remains an uncomfortable exclusion, as much of the most important material related to Abu Ghraib and other torture prisons comes from this perspective.
4.3.2: Eichmann in Abu Ghraib?
As well as highlighting the existence of Ghost Detainees, which is a significant intervention as by definition they were secret, Standard Operating Procedure has a significant intellectual project with relation to the representation of the torturer. The film challenges the notion of the charismatic torturer that we have seen informing, to differing extents, both 24 and Rendition. I use the intellectual optic of Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil here, because it allows me to negotiate complex territory such as demonisation and culpability; however, as I argue below, I do not believe it is a fully adequate explanatory mechanism for Abu Ghraib, because it cannot be meaningfully extrapolated to account for group actions – even if it is accepted that Arendt’s characterisation of Eichmann is accurate, it cannot be unproblematically generalised onto many people. Morris dealt with the central question raised by the banality of evil in a previous film, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999). This film investigates the author of The Leuchter Report, a document introduced as evidence in the 1988 trial of Ernst Zündel for Holocaust denial, which claimed to scientifically prove that the gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau had never been used to exterminate anyone.87 Unlike many Holocaust deniers, Leuchter apparently honestly believes in the goodness of his work. At the heart of the film, Morris asserted in an interview, was the question of whether “people have evil in their hearts, or do they do sometimes commit truly despicable acts while convincing themselves they’re good?”88
This theme is reprised in Standard Operating
Procedure.
87 Deborah Lipstadt gives a thorough account of this trial and the fraudulence of Leuchter’s expertise in Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 157-182.
88 Peter Applebome, “A Taste for the Eccentric, Marginal and Dangerous”, The New York Times (26/12/1999),
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Before unpacking this further, we should take a moment to clarify Arendt’s much- abused phrase. In her postscript to Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Arendt writes that “Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth,” and that aside from self-interest, “he had no motives at all.” The heart of Eichmann’s evil was that he “merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realised what he was doing.”89 Arendt’s point is not that Eichmann and the phenomenon of evil are in any way unremarkable, because clearly this is untrue; rather than being radically evil in the Kantian sense, however, the defining characteristic of Eichmann’s evil was, according to Seyla Benhabib, “not stupidity, wickedness, or depravity but one [Arendt] described as ‘thoughtlessness.’”90
The phrase has its roots in Arendt’s work on totalitarianism, wherein she outlines ideological indoctrination and mass thoughtlessness as essential preconditions for terror as a form of government. Amos Elon clarifies Arendt’s meaning in his 2006 introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem. Although the text was not intended as a theoretical treatise on the nature of evil, Arendt’s book implicitly maintains the thesis that evil “possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension”.91
Banal evil, as distinct from radical evil, is defined by the fact that the people committing it do not understand why what they are doing is wrong.
Accordingly, to emphasise the banality of evil is not to diminish that evil, merely to insist that one should not project onto it a level of dramatic grandeur that does not exist, which Arendt felt was being attempted by the architects of the Eichmann trial. As Benhabib summarises, “an ‘ordinary’ Eichmann did not fit the role that the prosecution in the case (led by Gideon Hausner) had in mind. They presented a diabolical and fanatical Eichmann, inflating his actual crimes into a near comprehensive responsibility for the Holocaust.”92 The overdetermination of Eichmann as a totemic enemy suited the political ends of the Israeli government. Standard Operating Procedure engages with the Abu Ghraib MPs in a similar way as Arendt does with Eichmann: Morris’ aim is to demolish the notion that the MPs were exceptionally evil. Lynndie England, for example, was often singled out for particular opprobrium, both for her failure to act as a soldier should and in terms that pathologise her as a particularly diseased individual woman.93 In Judith Thompson’s play Palace of the End
89 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006 (1963)), p.
287. Emphasis in original.
90
Seyla Benhabib, “Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem”, in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. by Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 75.
91 Amos Elon, “Introduction: The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt”, in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006), p. xiii.
92
Benhabib, “Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem”, p. 67.
93 For commentaries upon this demonisation of England, see for example Barbara Ehrenreich, “Feminism’s
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(2007), for instance, England is represented as an inarticulate racist brat who boasts, for example, that “I am very proud to say that the naked human pyramids WAS ALL MY IDEA.”94
This impulse to demonise and dismiss the Abu Ghraib MPs, the film insists, is the
same as the knee-jerk desire to demonise Eichmann; in this form of blame, the crime is contained through its association with a totemic and irredeemably separate figure who bears its burden.
However, the film goes beyond Arendt’s characterisation of procedural evil as thoughtless, and emphasises that the Abu Ghraib MPs were not acting amorally. Gourevitch writes:
Inexperienced, untrained, under attack, and under orders to do wrong, the low-ranking reservist MPs who implemented the nefarious policy of the war on terror on the MI block of the Abu Ghraib hard site knew that what they were doing was immoral, and they knew that if it wasn’t illegal, it ought to be.95
As disciplining subjects at once administering violent discipline and subject to the institutional conditions of the worst war prison in Iraq, the MPs were trapped in the standard operating procedure of Abu Ghraib. The film reveals that, far from morally vacant and unreflective, the soldiers were aware of their predicament and were not always as delighted to torture as the selectively revealed photographs – or Judith Thompson’s play – may have suggested. Linda Williams, for example, writes of Lynndie Engand that “neither is she quite the villain she seemed to be in all the pictures, nor should she be pitied as a misunderstood victim of her circumstances. Rather, she is viewed as an ethical being wrestling with her acquiescence to an unethical situation.”96
This attempt to create understanding, if not commonality and compassion, with the Abu Ghraib military police, has made the film attract negative attention from those who claim that it functions as an apology for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Bill Nichols, for example, writes – in a piece addressed directly to Morris – that “[y]ou seem to think that, as victims, they deserve a chance to offer their rationalisations to us. But as perpetrators, they were found guilty, and sentenced to jail. Believe me, Errol, I 65-70, or Marita Gronnvoll, “Gender (In)Visibility at Abu Ghraib”, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 10:3 (2007), pp. 371-398.
94 Judith Thompson, Palace of the End (London: Oberon Books, 2010 [2007]), p. 15. 95
Morris and Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure, p. 164.
96 Linda Williams, “Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure”, Camera Obscura 73, 25: 1 (2010), p. 40.
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understand how they were used as scapegoats by the administration but sometimes scapegoats are also guilty.”97
It seems that Nichols imagines that unless they explicitly disprove them, filmmakers necessarily approve of or agree with the people whose opinions they solicit. However, part of Morris’s strategy is to allow people to self-incriminate; the film does not leave their guilt in question, and does not require a viewer to accept anything anybody says uncritically. Secondly, perpetrator culpability is regrettably under-theorised – condemnation and judgment often takes the place of understanding, whereas I argue that justice is poorly served when motives are undivined and when circumstances and context are inadequately perceived. Justice has an investigatory dimension which certainly does not diminish its capacity to condemn, and empathy, which I will discuss below, is not automatically forgiveness.
As we saw above, Stephen de Wijze acknowledges that torture destroys torturers and corrodes institutions at the same time as he praises Jack Bauer’s willingness to break the rules to get things done. He stops short of praising Jack’s willingness to torture, but emphasises the extent to which he is trapped by the irreconcilable demands of his job, at the same time as his example of the moral degeneracy of torture is the Abu Ghraib prison. The value of Standard
Operating Procedure is that it underscores that the morality of the situation is not as clear-cut
as generalisations like this suggest. The reason that de Wijze can celebrate Jack at the same time as he can demonise people who actually do Jack’s job is because of the narrative context in which we encounter them: Jack is endowed with emotional complexity – he has a family, a love life, and so on – whereas real-world torturers are made one-dimensional scapegoats. Crucially, Jack is a skilled and experienced soldier in the field making second-by-second decisions which, it is heavily suggested, we cannot second-guess, and he is not an uneducated prison torturer engaged in routine violence. In their everyday speech register, in their casual dress, in every production decision which refuses to demonise the MPs, Morris emphasises not the exceptionality of the Abu Ghraib MPs but rather their familiarity. This film refuses both the idea of the demon torturer and the heroic torturer, showing them instead as ordinary people. At one point, for example, the film includes one of the home videos from Abu Ghraib showing Charles Graner playing with a kitten, a pastoral image all the more challenging for the humanity it reveals in the ringleader of the MP abuse. By showing the Abu Ghraib MPs as ordinary people involved in an extraordinarily awful situation, Standard Operating
Procedure dismantles the idea of the torturer as an “exceptional” personality. Quite rightly
97 Bill Nichols, “Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse: Letter to Errol Morris”, Jump Cut, 52 (2010).
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there are many narratives that address the experience of torture survivors in depth and complexity, and the next chapter is dedicated to this experience; however, we won’t understand torture properly until the image of the torturer is developed away from the polar misrepresentations of exoneration and condemnation. Standard Operating Procedure is an important gesture in this direction.
The most significant visual dimension of Morris’ representation of the MPs is the camera technology that Morris uses, a teleprompter-like device known as the Interrotron that invites the interviewees to speak directly to the lens. This allows viewers eye contact with the people speaking on screen.98 This frontality has many effects, most important of which is that, as Alex Gerbaz writes, an audience will “come close to experiencing the face-to-face encounters between Morris and [his interviewees], even though the use of the Interrotron means those encounters were never ‘direct’.”99 Gerbaz draws here on Levinas’ figure of the face-to-face encounter as an ethical confrontation, arguing that the frontality of the cinematic images produced by Morris’ Interrotron encourages the viewer’s gaze to be ethical. “The face on screen, positioned frontally, invites our response – our responsiveness. By reaching out from the diegesis of the film, it implores us to listen and look beyond the narrative.”100
It is an engaging, rehabilitative and potentially compassionate gaze, he argues. By requiring us to