A few years ago, most of us were appalled by the infamous photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Seeing those photos again in Errol Morris’s exceptional documentary Standard Operating Procedure lets us know that time has rightly done nothing to diminish our negative reactions to those images.
However, Morris’s film seeks to give us the picture behind those pictures.
In this way, his work indicts the upper echelons of the military and the American Government for creating a culture that demanded that acts of “humiliation” take place, while it also informs us that the real crimes were going on away from any camera.
In gaining interviews with people like Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman, Morris has given us an extraordinary record that will be analysed for years to come.
England discussed her love for Charles Graner, a man who’s now serving time in jail for his role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib, and the way female soldiers were required to adopt certain behaviours to fit in with the men.
Harman’s disquiet at what went on was revealed in letters she wrote to her partner.
It’s clear that behaving in inhumane ways doesn’t just hurt the victims, it also damages the perpetrators (and one participant, who definitely couldn’t be considered anti-war, pointed out that torture provides unreliable information because people will say anything under extreme duress).
One of Morris’s cinematic techniques allowed viewers to feel they were looking straight into the eyes of those he interviewed.
What those eyes revealed was pain, anger, hurt, confusion, stubbornness, ignorance, and, in at least a couple of cases, probable serious mental health issues.
In the Q & A session after the film’s screening at the Nova in Carlton last night, Morris stated that he sought to “humanise” those infamous subordinates, and he also suggested that the film was guided by the question of what any of us would do in that situation.
It’s a painfully honest truth that none of us know what we would’ve done.
While the film couldn’t definitively answer why the photos were taken, we were told they never would’ve been if it was believed what was going on was understood to be wrong.
It was also pointed out that the majority of detainees were innocent and that imprisoning children was not just in contravention of the Geneva Convention, it was in opposition to basic human decency, regardless of who the parents of those children were.
Standard Operating Procedure is an exceptional film and Morris is an important filmmaker.
Picture below: Lynndie England and a detainee
Picture below: England as she appears in Standard Operating Procedure
For an understanding of the officers perhaps look to the program on the German Wehrmacht (SBS last Friday) which uses evidence from the British spooks buggng the conversations of the high ranking officers kept in luxury POW quarters in Englsnd during the last past of WWII. The tapes reveal they knew of the extent of crimes ordered by Hitler had feelings of guilt. But they also tried to construct plausible stories of how the crimes was all the fault of the SS and not them.
It’s a painfully honest truth that none of us know what we would’ve done.
Sorry Darlene, I think this is completely over the top and wrong, unless you mean it in the trivial sense that we can’t rule out any random or outrageously unprecedented event happening in the future.
Sounds interesting and worth a look, Nana.
Hi Laura, no I mean it in the sense that in certain circumstances we perhaps would all behave in ways we wouldn’t usually (I think years ago there was a psychological study done - I will have to look it up - that indicated that this was the case). Factors like pressure from above, peer pressure and the stresses of war could make “monsters” of any of us.
The various studies that were done by psychologists on group behaviour when one group is given the authority and power to hurt another group is not encouraging, Laura.
Both the the Milgram Obedience Studies of 1961 and Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 showed a startlingly rapid slide into sadistic behaviour even amongst pacifists. Performed on various groups in many countries, between 62% and 85% of Milgram’s subjects complied with the instruction to give another person a (clearly marked) severe electric shock that was potentially lethal. (Here’s the account of one who refused.)
The subjects in these studies were volunteers, and the experimenters had no powers to enforce their compliance other than an authoritarian rhetoric.
The more I read of these experiments the harder I find it to not reach the conclusion that actually a clear majority of people will go along with cruel and unusual behaviour if they are given license to dole it out. Of course I like to think that I would be one of those who would refuse to do something abusive to another human being who had done me no harm, but I’m sure that most of the subjects in these experiments thought the same before they participated.
“Factors like pressure from above, peer pressure and the stresses of war could make “monsters” of any of us.”
IMHO, much of the groundwork for winding up so easily manipulated to do wrong occurs in the early stages of military training. Many, many soldiers can come through this and still retain their decency, but not all.
On the other hand Darlene, there are those of us who would NEVER voluntarily submit ourselves to the training away of our decency in the first place. Perhaps Helen considers herself among these.
Military training can also be a prophylactic against routine abuse - David Grossman has done some interesting work on this stuff. Study after study has shown that poorly trained recruits with insufficiently clear procedural regimes tend to wig out more readily. M. Scott Peck’s study of ‘C Company’ and the My Lai massacre also bears this out.
On the other other hand, maybe Helen would be better called by her actual blog-name of Laura. Apologies to both.
Heh, not a problem, FDB. One of the reasons I picked my nic was to avoid confusion with Cast-Iron Helen, who started blogging before me. I’ve seen what happens on a blog when things like three Tims and four Grahams start happening. Not pretty.
FDB, when you said ‘Helen’ did you mean me? My name is Laura.
Tigtog, the Stanford experiment was carried out on young men - college students - not on mature people who have seen a bit of life and developed their empathetic capacities. For this reason I’m not inclined to credit it with all the explanatory power that’s usually claimed for it.
Darlene, I still reject what you are saying, in particular the idea that anybody might do the same as Private England when given her job. I’m certain I would not participate in torture short of being physically forced to, no matter how collusive the environment, and I’m certain I’m far from alone in this.
But then none of the people participating in this particular discussion are ever likely to find them/ourselves in a Lynndie England situation in the first place. If I remember rightly (no time to look it up), Lynndie England represents a US demographic (poor, undereducated, rural/working class) to whom the US Army represented a way out and up the class ladder, and who represented to the US Army a handy and easily acquired source of cannon fodder. (I can’t picture any of the women in this thread falling in ‘love’ with the sadistic psycho Graner, either, much less getting pregnant to him in any country or situation, much less while on a tour of duty.) I’ve always regarded Lynndie England’s part of the Abu Ghraib story as essentially a class tragedy.
True, and that account from one man who refused to continue with the Milgram experiment reveals that he was middle-aged with a strong distrust for authority and a suspicious nature. He also thought that Milgram’s experiments were only a pale imitation of the structured enforcement of authoritarian abuse under the Nazis, where there were dangerous consequences for those who refused to participate in the humiliation and abuse of the undesirables. A strong enforcement structure makes it more likely that people will comply in order to save themselves.
Of course, the bulk of the guards at Abu Ghraib were young people who went into the army either straight from or not long out of high school. There were also real consequences for them under military discipline in refusing that were not there for student volunteers at Stanford. Again, that makes it more likely that they would comply rather than less likely.
Me, now, older, wiser and super-skeptical? Yes, I would refuse if the consequences were only on me. Would I still refuse if the consequence were having my family added to a list of who gets rounded up to go to prison next week? I can’t answer that one as definitely. Would I have had the experience and skepticism to refuse back when I was first at uni? I really have no idea.
Thanks for that info, tigtog.
It’s worth remembering, Laura, that many of the people in Abu Ghraib were young and/or male or trying very hard to fit into an aggressive culture.
The film points out that the actual torture went on away from the camera lens (although obviously it’s easy to have different opinions about definition when it comes to things like “torture”). The actions were regarded as “criminal” and “humiliation”. Some of the actions were deemed to be “standing operating procedure”.
While it’d be nice to say that “I’d never behave like that”, I just don’t think it’s something that can be honestly said (and I don’t think it helps us to learn anything when we do say it - we’re all human). I’ve never been to a war zone. And no, I wouldn’t enlist.
Also, it should also be pointed out that these people (people like England) aren’t people with real power. According to the Wikipedia entry about England:
“Born in Ashland, Kentucky,[3] England moved with her family to Fort Ashby, West Virginia, when she was two years old. She grew up as the daughter of a railroad worker, Kenneth England, who worked at the station in nearby Cumberland, Maryland, and Terrie Bowling England. The family lived in a trailer park. At school, England was known for wearing combat boots and camouflage fatigues.
“England joined the United States Army Reserve in Cumberland in 2001 while she was a junior at Frankfort High School near Short Gap, to escape from a night job in the same chicken-processing factory in Moorefield made famous in a PETA video[4] and to earn money so she could go to college to become a storm chaser. She was also a member of the Future Farmers of America. After graduating from Frankfort High School in 2001, she worked as a cashier in an IGA store and married a co-worker, James L. Fike, in 2002, but they later divorced. She was sent to Iraq in 2003.”
The last post I did was about child abuse. I think we can accept that people respond in different ways to the pain and stresses attached to that. Well, I think we can also accept that people can respond in different ways to being placed in a war situation.
Thanks to PC and tigtog for comments and further comments. I was typing while they were posting. I agree with the points they both make.
Pav, sure, if I was Lynndie England I’d probably have acted as she did, and I’m not going to call her a monster or blame her for everything that went on at Abu Ghraib, but that is a very far cry from accepting without demur the suggestion that hired into in her job anyone else, with completely different life history and so forth, might be reasonably expected to behave just as dreadfully. That’s really problematic in my opinion for all kinds of reasons - it’s a bit insulting, for one thing, but when ideas like that become widely accepted truisms you get SS let off the hook, you get people relinquishing their sense of themselves as moral agents.
Tigs I doubt you would have volunteered for such an experiment (pretending to be a participant in prison life) when you were at uni (unless you’ve changed a lot since then.) Some psychologist should do a study on the kinds of personalities who self-select to be subjects for these sorts of bizarre experiments. I vividly remember about ten years ago reading a classified ad in the campus paper for volunteers to have a measuring device of some kind attached to their penises while they watched different sorts of movies. Worthy contribution to knowledge and all that, but really….
I probably would have volunteered for a study of memory and learning though, which was how the Milgram experiment was described. It wasn’t just young students who took part in that one. His lowest compliance rate with administering the severe shocks was still over 60% of participants.
Agreed. In my own roundabout way I was engaging with Darlene’s argument by saying there were other things to be factored into the ‘What would I do if it was me?’ question, and that England’s behaviour seemed to me to be commensurate with her background, including her attraction to and arrival in the army.
This is the sort of discussion where it’s fatally easy not to notice the elision from ‘reasons’ to ‘excuses’ as one works through the permutations. I don’t think England’s background excuses her behaviour — but I do think it helps to explain it.
I have to say that I really liked Morris’s idea of “humanising” the soldiers and pointing the finger at the hierarchy. When we are discussing all this kind of stuff we have to take military culture into account.
And it must be said that the soldiers were a varied bunch. At least one of them looked like he was about to crack up on screen, while others were more complex and difficult characters (Morris wasn’t able to talk to Graner - Graner is still in the jug). England’s feminist analysis only partially convinced me, but I was glad to get the chance to hear this woman speak and to see her. She went from being a symbol and a strange presence in some deeply disturbing photographs to being a human being.
An unintentionally amusing section of the film came when one chap mentioned that they had tried to use hip hop music and then heavy metal in a way that would distress the prisoners. Neither of those genres worked, but the detainees apparently couldn’t stand country music.
Errol Morris is one of my heroes. He has a fantastic website, by the way.
And here is the link for those who are interested:
http://www.errolmorris.com/
This is the first Morris film I’ve seen, and I was impressed. Time to go back and look at his earlier work.
I am spewing that I missed this - I had no idea he was coming out.
Morris is sensational. ‘Mr. Death’ is one of the best docos ever made, and that (unjustly)isn’t even as highly regarded as ‘Thin Blue Line’ or ‘Gates of Heaven’ which make top ten lists all over the place.
I find it interesting that the subject matter he tackles has changed over time. Where he started out documenting the foibles of pet cemetery owners and an obscure murder case, he ended up on Abu Ghraib and before this a lengthy interview doco with Robert MacNamara.
I’ll be seeing this one soon…
Comes out next week, Michael. Highly recommended.
Morris does seem to have diverse interests.
Many of Errol Morris’s documentaries appear to be around the interesting theme of the systematisation of human subjectivity; Fog of War for me is the standout but this film appears to be another in that series and it looks very interesting. Can’t wait.
Errol Morris definitely one of the finest film-makers, ever.
If you think most you or most other people are immune from the effects of the kinds of influences which made people such as England behave as they did, I’m sorry you are painfully naive. History has demonstrated repeatedly that people can relatively easily be led to brutalize others. For example, the Nazis in WWII managed to imprison, brutalize and kill millions - this was not the work of a handful, it took thousands across an entire continent. The regimes of Stalin, Pol Pot and more recently Mugabe are guilty of similar crimes. None of these people acted or are acting alone.
I’d like to say that in Englands place, I would have behaved differently, but I dont know because I wasnt there and I have never been in that situation. I do believe that under the right circumstances, most of us are capable of anything.
Is ‘Mr Death’ the doco about the guy in the States who built execution equipment? Or have I got it mixed up with something else? If it’s the same one, it’s very freaky indeed.
Pavlov’s cat says “I can’t picture any of the women in this thread falling in ‘love’ with the sadistic psycho…”
Well one of us did have an unfortunate and wild time with a Fijian ex-soldier, one of Rabuka’s attack dogs of the Counter Revolutionary Warfare Unit who was part of the atrocities of the first two Fijian coups. Look at Rabuka now, the senior respected statesman. His crew? Now all dead at the hands of rival soldiers, in prison, or locked up in the criminal psych ward of St Giles.
yes.
pre-dawn leftist, the indications of recent research into the psychology of domination is that people will uncritically take up brutal behaviour and similar group roles only when those behaviours are consistent with their social identities. Racial domination, tyranny etc are easier in a society where racism etc is an accepted and acceptable behaviour. The overwhelming majority of the people who worked for the Third Reich did so willingly and enthusiastically, because they agreed with its ideals and found the leadership inspirational. Eichmann may have claimed to be ‘just following orders’, but they happened to be orders that tallied with his intense, murderous hatred of Jews.
The explanatory advantage of social identity theory is that it accounts for how resistance to domination and immoral commands develops. The mantra that anyone could become a brute or a tyrant doesn’t even acknowledge that this happens.
To say that under comparable circumstances & influences anyone would act like torturers or genocidalists, I assume means saying that anyone who grows up in that historical context might do what they did. OK - but what about people who have not grown up in an environment which instils as a commonly accepted truth the belief that non Aryan people are subhuman or vermin?
It’s just not believable that your average LP commenter, with his or her own psychological history and circumstances, if teleported into Bergen-Belsen in an SS uniform, would uncritically do as instructed by superior officers. Whereas someone who hated Jews and felt it was socially OK to do so, might.
The mantra that ‘any of us might do the same’ is peculiar to say the least.