Philip Gourevitch / Features / Untitled Books

'There’s a level in which I’m drawn to stories that trouble me because they seem like major reflections of who we are in our time, and they feel like they’re undigested.'

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch's new book Standard Operating Procedure is an investigation into the American human rights violations at Abu Ghraib. H etalks to James Vitus about using the interview as a means to explore a story and applying the principles of the novel to non-fiction.

'Sometimes you are outraged about what they’re doing, sometimes you’re outraged about what’s being done to them, sometimes you’re outraged about both.'

The image hits you in the pit of your stomach, not right away but after a few seconds delay as your mind struggles to digest what you're seeing. A male figure balances on a narrow box, his arms outstretched in a ghastly echo of the crucifixion. Copper wires are connected to each of his upturned palms, an implicit threat of electrocution should he lose his balance. His naked figure is shrouded with a blanket fashioned into a crude poncho and his face is covered with a pointed black hood reminiscent of a Halloween costume, or something favoured by the Klu Klux Klan. The effect is sinister and frightening, and deeply uncomfortable, not least because it is unclear what is going on.

This now infamous photograph was one of a series to be published around the world in 2004 exposing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at the military prison Abu Ghraib, forty miles from Baghdad. It marked a souring of the American led 'liberation of Iraq' and a turning point in the War on Terror, for 'if you fight terror with terror, how can you tell which is which?'

This is the question asked by Philip Gourevitch towards the end of Standard Operating Procedure, his detailed account of the events surrounding the scandal of Abu Ghraib and the stories of the soldiers involved. It is a collaboration with the filmmaker Errol Morris, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with soldiers who had served at Abu Ghraib, for his documentary of the same name. Both projects are drawn from this material and were worked on simultaneously, but are to a large extent independent offerings, each man applying his distinct sensibility to the material; 'See Errol's film; it's quite different. I mean, it doesn't disagree on the fundamental facts but it's a quite different way of composing them.'

We are installed in his publisher's office where Gourevitch has arrived straight from an early appearance on Radio 4 and he faces a whole morning of press interviews. His tall frame is folded awkwardly on to the low sofa, and if ill at ease with small talk, he quickly engages as soon as the conversation turns to the book.

Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia and raised in Connecticut where his father taught philosophy at Wesleyan University. He studied creative writing at Colombia and started out writing fiction before turning to reportage, 'I stumbled into reporting pretty much by chance, and discovered I really loved it. I loved getting out in the world and loved having this excuse to ask nosey questions. Most of the things that interested me in literature I could find ways to do in reporting'. Now in his forties, he is the editor of the venerable literary magazine The Paris Review and a long staff writer for the New Yorker. However, it is his books that have garnered him most recognition in recent years, attracting widespread acclaim for their unflinching treatment of difficult material, and elegant literary style. His book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award. Standard Operating Procedure is no less ambitious in its approach to one of the most troublesome and inflammatory episodes in recent history. What attracted him to such a gruesome and still-raw story? 'There's a level in which I'm drawn to stories that trouble me because they seem like major reflections of who we are in our time, and they feel like they're undigested. I think there's a lot of helplessness and embarrassment that we've all felt, a 'gross national dishonour' on our country.'

He speaks bitterly about his country's role in the Iraq war but never allows bile to taint his writing. He uses interviews to get to the heart of a story, artfully choreographing a cacophony of voices into a clear, pulsing narrative. 'Most of my work is about creating a narrative out of a group of people who are either situationally or circumstantially related, or at times dramatically related,' he says, admitting that the interview, both as a format and a device, has become central to his career.

In Standard Operating Procedure, he allows each subject to present their own case rather than moulding their testimony to his own agenda. 'Its not so much about me subsuming them as me trying to reach a place where I know more about the story of which they are all part than any of the parts can.' While he never vindicates the actions of even the most naive of the soldiers, he allows room for our sympathy for them - a quite unexpected response. 'They were very screwed-over young people who were sent into a situation very much beyond them, which was dangerous, which was illegal - the prison was in a combat zone and under constant fire. So they're in an extremely dangerous situation, without security, at the end of a supply chain so they are poorly equipped, they are poorly trained and they are given no support from above. On the contrary; they are cut loose. They are put in a situation where they are set up to be messed up.'

This is most pertinent in the case of the female soldiers Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman and Megan Ambuhl. It was part of American policy at the prison to use the presence of female soldiers to shame and sexually humiliate male prisoners. 'This was always presented as this kind of bizarre Arab cultural hang-up, you know; Arab men, Muslim men; they really don't like being paraded around naked, as if your average American thinks nothing of being stripped naked, handcuffed, hooded, and paraded around by his captors. Unless you really, really like it, you really, really don't,' he laughs angrily at such crude cultural stereotyping. 'But the fact that these women are being used as instruments of humiliation; that's abuse of those women as well as of those prisoners. Do they complain about it? No, because they're being tough.'

The litany of screw-ups, rule-breaking, and sickening dehumanisation perpetrated at Abu Ghraib is long, and the conditions that licensed it are born of a tangle of conflicting instruction from the White House down. Indeed, the title of Gourevitch's book refers to a clear set of official guidelines that should govern any given aspect of military procedure; in this case the treatment and interrogation of high value Iraqi prisoners. At Abu Ghraib these procedures were confused, contradictory or simply not communicated to those on the ground.

While Gourevitch presents the events in question with admirable clarity, he does not shy away from admitting that the complexity of the human stories is less easy to order. 'Sometimes you are outraged about what they're doing, sometimes you're outraged about what's being done to them, sometimes you're outraged about both. Your sympathies shift around, and on some level I hope you'll recognise that its not so easy to be sure how you would behave in that situation.'

Gourevitch's finest achievement is perhaps his ability to draw a human story from this material, no mean feat when a large portion of his source information is dry-as-toast military documentation with glossaries of acronyms that run to several pages. At the core of his book lies the relationship between Corporal Charles Graner and his girlfriend Private First Class Lynndie England. They both appear in many of the most iconic photos, smiling and mugging for the camera, and as a result have become the public face of the scandal. What is shocking about these photos is not simply the human suffering they depict but the incomprehensible attitudes displayed by Graner and England; they behave as though posing for holiday snaps. She is directed by him; hold this, stand there, say cheese. At times she looks unsure, but she is in his thrall, and soon becomes an eager photographer herself as she seeks to gain his approval. For his part, he shows nothing less than arrogant pride in the arrangement of naked figures behind him and not a flicker of compunction for the pain and humiliation he is inflicting.

This is the marrow of a story that made most people turn their heads in disgust yet Gourevitch is compelled to discover how these seemingly ordinary soldiers became abusers. 'The Lynndie England story, in its moments, is really raw, and you also realise she's very young. It's pretty pointed that the night of the pyramid it the night of her twenty-first birthday.' He's referring to one of the photographs in which Graner arranged a group of hooded, naked, compliant prisoners into a human pyramid. He and England are shown standing at the head of the pyramid, their arms around each other, giving the thumbs up sign.

'It's pretty sad. She's twenty-one years old; she's been married already, she's gotten off to an early heavy start. When I was writing and thinking about her, she seemed to me like a character in a naturalist late nineteenth century/twentieth century novel, like Dreiser, or Zola, or Frank Norris, where you feel this social fate pressing down on this young person who in a few thoughtlessly-made moves will be defined for the rest of their life. It's misjudgement, but its just humanity. A lack of sophistication perhaps, but not stupidity; she's quite self-aware by the end. And when she says "If I hadn't have met Graner I never would have got in any of this trouble... but if I hadn't have met Graner I wouldn't have had my kid and I wouldn't give that up for the world," I mean, is there a Greek dramatist who's defined fate better?'

Gourevitch argues for a greater cross-pollination between non-fiction and the novel, something that is strongly felt in his own writing. 'That's how I learned anything. I feel like I got a profound moral, political, social, human education from reading novels. Whether it's Conrad or Mark Twain or Virginia Woolf...they're writers who understand that part of their purpose is to engage you at a full sensory level and to use all of their powers to make this the most vivid experience they can. We should be doing that...novels are conveyer belts for information.'

So, what comes after a book like this? 'It always takes a little while to clear the decks, clear your head. I'll do some reported pieces, I'm sure, a little magazine work, and I'd like to get into this novel - something that's been kicking around for twenty-five years. I started taking notes on it in 1984 based on some stories I was reading in the press about Vietnamese boat people who were still coming out of Vietnam a decade after the end of the war and were now caught in a kind of odd limbo. I've always kept a file that I call footage, in my computer, where I just dump monologues and things made up or found. So I'll just look and see if that is actually worth...maybe I'll spend a couple of months permanently deleting it, and then I'll be relieved of it, or I will get into it and relieve myself that way.' He insists he has never given up writing fiction, its just that the reportage got in the way for a while.

Friday, 4 July, 2008

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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story

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Issue 24 / August - September 2010

'There’s a level in which I’m drawn to stories that trouble me because they seem like major reflections of who we are in our time, and they feel like they’re undigested.'