The Dogs of War
NTY Book Review
By RAYMOND BONNER
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE
By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
286 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
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.
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.
(Continued here.)
By RAYMOND BONNER
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE
By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
286 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
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.
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.
(Continued here.)
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