Abu Ghraib and the American Media
by Lila Rajiva
ISBN: 1-58367-119-6/$14.95 paper 176 pp./Media Studies/Politics
"The immediate question of personal responsibility, 'Who did this?' yields the unacceptable answer, 'Americans and Christians.' Unless, it is rewritten subtly to run, 'Who among us did this?' Then the answer is more reassuring, 'Americans of a marginal variety. In fact, this abuse is un-American and these people are really not Americans.'"
THE STRATEGY OF PERSONALIZING AND SENSATIONALIZING by which the story [of torture at Abu Ghraib] was removed from the realm of the political and reinstated as a narrative about individual morality parallels that by which the war crimes issue was narrowed and then reframed as a debate on the status of individual detainees under Geneva and therefore of the paper trail left by the administration in undermining their status. In both these narrative genres, what we might call the pulp drama surrounding the low-level reservists and the forensic drama focused on the higher ranks, significant aspects of the scandal are simply ignored or displaced by less significant ones and the script is tightly controlled by the expectations elicited by the two genres. In the pulp drama, personal character and motivations, racial and religious identity, cultural and sexual elements are emphasized and institutional factors are pushed into the background. In the forensic drama, procedural and institutional analysis is foregrounded and the individual personalities are ignored.
Both strategies have their uses. The pulp drama, which by its nature limits culpability to the protagonists, is the natural form for a narrative that focuses on the misdeeds of a few. Institutional analysis would lead too far afield for comfort. Even focusing on personalities, though, has its discomfiting side—the ethnic and religious identities of two of the most prominent actors, Charles Graner and Lynndie England, are Caucasian and Christian, and the immediate question of personal responsibility, "Who did this?" yields the unacceptable answer, "Americans and Christians." Unless, it is rewritten subtly to run, "Who among us did this?" Then the answer is more reassuring, "Americans of a marginal variety. In fact, this abuse is un-American and these people are really not Americans. They are criminals, perverts, trailer trash."
And that precisely is how the facts are represented. We are repeatedly told about England's roots in rural Virginia, her work on the night shift at a chicken processing plant, how she enjoyed running out into storms as a child, loved the movie Twister, and wanted to be a meteorologist when she grew up.(1) Both she and Graner had failed marriages behind them, we are told. Graner's home, Uniontown, a former mining town, is only 75 miles from Fort Ashby, where England's parents live in a trailer park at the end of the dirt road off the highway. Graner, a one-time marine, worked as a guard at the maximum-security state prison in Greene County, Pennsylvania, and in his spare time remodeled his house and played with his children. We learn that in 2001 Graner was accused by his then wife of grabbing her by the hair, dragging her out of a bedroom, and trying to throw her down the stairs. We hear that his idea of a joke was spraying mace into the coffee of a new guard at Fayette County Prison.(2) Such details satisfy popular tastes and there is no need to question the motivation of the reporter who looks for them or to ascribe it to bias against the rural poor since Jessica Lynch, from a similar background, a Sunday School teacher from a small town in Virginia, was transformed into a national heroine. Nevertheless, it seems curious that the personal or professional histories of senior officials were not publicized in the same way. The professional histories of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, "Jerry" Boykin, Steven Bucci, Douglas Feith, and Stephen Cambone ought to have warranted at least as much scrutiny as the resume of a low-level correctional officer. But, none of them were questioned about any of their affiliations or views that might have adversely affected the formulation of American policies. Instead, they were allowed to defend themselves with the bureaucratic jargon and semantic hair-splitting characteristic of the forensic drama.
Discounting personalities and emphasizing procedures works well as a strategy if one's objective is to escape personal culpability and lay the blame on institutional factors, on failure in communication, lack of oversight and coordination, or on improper follow-through, and this was precisely how the most dangerous charges facing the administration were finally neutralized. In the interim, the pulp drama played up the religious beliefs of the perpetrators. Specialist Darby, the soldier who reported the abuse anonymously in January, quoted Graner as telling him: "The Christian in me knows it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me can't help but love making a grown man piss himself."(3) Graner and England are described as regulars at a Pentecostal tabernacle and we are given a picture of Graner's half-finished porch in Uniontown with a flag in the window and Scripture on a stone in his front yard quoting the Old Testament prophet Hosea who used his own ill-fated marriage to warn others of the bitter fruits of infidelity: "Reap the fruit of unfailing love... for it is time to seek the Lord until he comes and showers righteousness on you."(4)
That all-important question was finally asked at the appropriate forum, a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 7.
Despite the furor, the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings were focused rather arcanely on the system's corrective mechanism—whether or not it had kicked in and why Congress had had to learn about the story from the media.(5) On one level, given the enormous damage to the country's international standing, this emphasis was quite understandable, but on another it steered the debate toward analyzing the process by which the abuse came to light rather than considering the substantive changes needed to correct it. This emphasis on procedure only added to an inherent tendency in American public debate for issues to be rewritten as legal argumentation. The chaotic irrationality of political reality is forced into the straitjacket of statutory law and documentary evidence while mastery of political reality—political skill—is superseded by adherence to laws. Of course, the forensic model is not at all exceptional in American political discourse but even written into the founding of the country by those who framed the constitution to create "a nation of laws not men."
In this sense, Abu Ghraib was not caused by the abandonment of the rule of law, as many argue, as much as an excessive regard for the rule of law, a regard that fails to take into account the men under the laws and the political reality in which laws operate. That reality was one to which the founders themselves were acutely sensitive and the constitutional framework they created was meant only to guide not substitute for it. The founders were well aware that when political reality—in other words, men—change, the law becomes not simply redundant but actually counterproductive. Like the softly lit mirror in which an aging beauty finds the reassurance that harsh daylight cannot give her, the law and the courts dangerously encourage a polity's illusions about its own impeccable nature when reality suggests otherwise. The forensic drama conveys the same moral self-satisfaction as the narrative of the pulp drama, except that where the pulp drama allows us to admire our own probity against the villainy of some select targets, the forensic drama allows us to admire the rule of law against the infraction of some specific regulation. In both cases, the debate itself is constrained by the language of morality and becomes a self-referential system that does not allow its users the awareness that the use of moral language is not the same thing as either the capacity for moral intuition or the practice of moral action. By reducing the complexity and ambiguity of a political disaster to specific cases of legal wrongdoing, both parties accepted the premise that Abu Ghraib was an infraction of law, whereas in Talleyrand's memorable phrase, it was far worse than a crime, it was a blunder.
(1) John Woestendiek, "W. Va. reservist caught up in a storm of controversy," Baltimore Sun, May 6, 2004.
(2) David Finkel and Christian Davenport, "Records Paint Dark Picture of Guards," Washington Post, June 5, 2004.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Dennis Cauchon, Debbie Howlett. and Rick Hampson, "Abuse scandal meets disbelief in hometowns," USA Today, May 6, 2004.
(5) "Rumsfeld Testifies Before Senate Armed Services Committee," Washington Post, May 7, 2004.
-- Michael Pugliese