At a press conference held six days after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney stated:
We’ll have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies…it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal basically, to achieve our objectives. (Quoted in Froomkin 2005)
The ‘dark side’ refers to the clandestine operations that might be required to confront and combat terrorist organisations such as al-Qaida. Although the US military and intelligence agencies had considerable experience and protocols for such work, the administration believed that it was necessary to challenge the constraints placed on imprisonment and torture by the constitution, the Geneva Conventions and legal and historical precedent. Philippe Sands describes how lawyers at the Justice Department were drafted into service to provide a context in which illegal imprisonment without due process and the use of ‘enhanced tactics’ during interrogations could be permitted and condoned (2008: 154). The interpretation of law produced by this ‘torture team’ as Sands called it – the Haynes Memo – was signed by Donald Rumsfeld on 2 December 2001, providing what Stephen Prince terms a ‘legal shield’ for the use of torture against suspected terrorists (2009: 176).
Securing consent for this policy took place across a broad cultural terrain, from statements by key politicians to the television series
24 (2001–10), which frequently presented its central protagonist, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), with a stark dilemma:
a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process – allowing a terrorist plot to proceed – or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets. (Mayer 2007)
24’s producer Joel Sarnow has openly stated that the series was designed to be ‘patriotic’ and to corroborate the policy initiatives of the president and his team (see Mayer 2007), leading Prince to note that ‘killing for the state, and for the greater good, is 24’s gold standard of moral behaviour’ (2012: 247). Investigating the use of torture post-9/11, Sands even unearthed evidence that the scenarios depicted in 24 directly influenced interrogators in Iraq, who modelled their practices on scenes from the series (see 2008: 88–9). Bauer often faced a ‘ticking bomb scenario’ in which torture was shown to be the only way of soliciting information in a time-critical situation in order to save the lives of a great many innocent civilians. John Ip notes that this time-critical framing appeared in various official government documents and statements that assert the legality of torture and was designed to overcome the absolutist nature of its legal prohibition (2009: 43). The same rationale can be found in a range of feature films in a number of different genres, including the revenge film Man on Fire, discussed in chapter two. In that film, ex-CIA agent John Creasy achieves his goals by torturing those who have knowledge of where an abducted child, formerly under his protection, is being kept prisoner. Similarly, in Five Fingers (2006) the protagonists conducting torture (in this case, the cutting off of fingers) appear to be Islamic terrorists but are later shown to be CIA agents whose work reveals and prevents a terror plot. In Unthinkable (2010) a terrorist has planted nuclear bombs in three (or possibly four) US cities. Only when interrogators are shown to be willing to kill the terrorist’s wife and torture his children is the threat allayed. The message in these films seems clear: torture is necessary and it works.
However, this stance came under considerable pressure mid-decade. In
Against All Enemies (2004), the administration’s former anti-terrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, argued that the response to 9/11 had been muddled and ineffective, with George W. Bush and key policymakers distracted from targeting al-Qaida by an obsession with Iraq. Topping the
New York Times bestseller list for eleven weeks, Clarke’s book indexed growing dissatisfaction with and distrust of the government. Another key figure drawing attention to uncomfortable facts was journalist Seymour Hersh, who between 2002 and 2004 published 26 stories in the
New Yorker describing, amongst other things, the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11, the lack of post-war planning in Afghanistan and Iraq, the reliance on dubious intelligence related to Iraqi WMD and the widespread use of illegal rendition flights whereby terrorist suspects were flown to countries in which due process was not followed and torture was permitted (see Hersh 2004b). Hersh revealed that according to an internal military report, guards at Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq had committed numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ and that army regulations and the Geneva Conventions had been routinely violated. The abuse included
breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape […]; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee. (Hersh 2004a)
On 28 April 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes covered the story and illustrated the abuse with a number of sensational photographs taken by prison guards, resulting in large-scale media coverage. A PBS documentary, The Torture Question (2005), also raised awareness of the issue. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a less uncritical view of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ became more widespread, with a shift from endorsement of Bush’s ‘legal shield’ and tacit consent for torture to acknowledgement of, and willingness to tackle, the shifting and morally compromised realities of the ‘war on terror’. As Holloway notes, torture became ‘a revealing and representative discourse of the times’, standing in for widespread scepticism towards the official response to 9/11 (2008: 53).
Indeed, most observers agree that by 2004 popular support for the government’s foreign policy commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq had ebbed, with a critical view of the neoconservative presidency and the wider terrain of the ‘war on terror’ gaining considerable traction (see Holloway 2008: 91; Kellner 2010: 1). Holloway argues that ‘by the fifth anniversary of 9/11, American artists and audiences seem to have agreed that the major taboos that structured immediate responses to the attacks had now been lifted’ (2008: 91). As a result, much of the critique levelled by the documentaries and feature films described in previous chapters, including
25th Hour,
Parallel Lines,
Fahrenheit 9/11 and
Syriana, was retrospectively acknowledged as valid. This chapter focuses on a group of films that were made against this background, films which feature scenes of torture that implicitly (in the ‘torture porn’ cycle) and explicitly (in
Rendition (2007) and
Standard Operating Procedure (2008)) reference events at Abu Ghraib.
A number of commentators have noted how a post-9/11 cycle of horror films emerged from this ambivalent, conflicting reality (see Briefel and Miller 2011; Wetmore 2012). Films such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) contain scenes of prolonged, graphically portrayed, torture and were given the label ‘torture porn’ by film critic David Edelstein. Edelstein’s review of the films claimed that they showed how ‘fear supplants empathy and makes us all potential torturers [and that post-9/11] we’ve engaged in a national debate about the morality of torture, fuelled by horrifying pictures of manifestly decent men and women…enacting brutal scenarios of domination at Abu Ghraib’ (2006). How, then, do these two films relate to the post-Abu Ghraib context?
A number of plot elements in Hostel can be read as uneasy recognitions of rendition and torture. In a dramatic central sequence a US tourist wakes up in a torture chamber, wearing a hood like those worn by the prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs, and asks his captor, ‘Who are you? Where the fuck am I? What is this shit?’ He gets little by way of explanation and is tortured to death. Here the viewer is offered the point of view of someone ‘extraordinarily rendered’, with no sense of what is about to happen to them or why. In another scene a character is beheaded and a photograph of his head is sent by mobile phone, recalling gruesome jihadi films of kidnapping and beheading. In colour, tone and lighting, Hostel’s mise-en-scène is also broadly similar to the photographs of torture chambers at Abu Ghraib. These elements have led Brigid Cherry to claim that the film’s ‘shock and gore’ is symptomatic of the war on terror’s ‘shock and awe’ (2009: 58) and underpin readings of the film as a progressive critique of the dangers of unbridled US power (see Hollyfield 2009).
However, other elements point to a more conservative logic at play. Arguably, by putting Americans on the receiving end of torture, the film once again places the US in the position of victim. Those responsible for running the torture chamber in
Hostel are marked by their otherness: Eastern Europeans, women and homosexuals conspire to terrorise American men. One character says that ‘nowadays everyone wants to kill Americans’ and states that the torturers are willing to pay extra to kill a US citizen, thereby indicating that, although a number of nationalities are subjected to torture, Americans are the most endangered. As Kim Newman notes, ‘in a world where foreigners worry about winding up at the mercy of Americans,
Hostel is about Americans being terrified of the rest of the planet’ (2006: 30). In concert with its depiction of otherness, the film’s ending has the main protagonist escape and then torture and kill his captors, activating the logic of the revenge film. If 1970s horror films like
The Last House on the Left (1972) and
The Hills Have Eyes (1977) have their protagonists wreaking revenge only to show that they have become monsters themselves,
Hostel offers no such reading. The logic here is, as Newman points out, that ‘torture is an atrocity when perpetrated on Americans but is justified when used by Americans against those responsible for starting the conflict’ (2006: 31). In this view,
Hostel encourages Americans to be fearful of difference, to draw in their horizons in order to keep themselves out of harm’s way and to relish the performance of retributive (and in the film’s terms self-defensive) violence. For all its activation of, and immersion of the viewer in, places that recall extraordinary rendition and torture, the film ultimately provides an extension of the logic of
24 that torture is a necessary evil when conduced for the sake of self-preservation and justice.
Douglas Kellner claims that the Saw franchise displays a similar logic to Hostel, a ‘brutal Darwinian vision [of] kill or be killed’ (2010: 7), noting that Saw IV (2007)
reveals a backstory that indicates [that the film’s central protagonist] Jigsaw became crazed when his pregnant wife was accosted by a junkie in a violent encounter and lost their child. Thereafter, Jigsaw turned his energies as engineer and builder to construct elaborate torture mechanisms and tests to punish ‘Evil’ of various sorts, just as the Bush-Cheney administration was constructing apparatuses of torture in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, and other sites throughout the world to punish its alleged enemies and ‘evil doers’. (Ibid.)
Here Kellner reads
Saw, the first film in the series, privileged with narrative information taken from
Saw IV, a later instalment, as a moralising revenge film (see also Sharrett 2009). However, closer examination suggests that this is overly simplistic.
Saw suggests that the victims of Jigsaw’s (Tobin Bell) games are chosen as a result of their lack of moral rectitude; their failure to live good lives has drawn them into their current predicament. The hinterland here seems to be that of a corrupt society forced to face its sins. There is a correspondence here to
25th Hour’s depiction of a personal reckoning modelling a wider cultural/national reckoning. As such,
Saw might be read allegorically as signifying, again, Johnson’s concept of ‘blowback’ – namely, events in the past (in Johnson’s case, terror precipitated abroad by agencies; in the film’s logic, the past misdeeds of Jigsaw’s victims) eventually have unpredictable, and often bloody, consequences.
The original pitch for the film showed a man in a cell with a ‘reverse bear trap’ fitted to his skull and with a clock ticking; to release himself from the trap, and armed only with a knife, the man was required to retrieve the key from the stomach of an unconscious man sharing his cell.
39 Saw is basically a reiteration and amplification of this initial dramatic scenario, with two imprisoned men informed that their families will be killed and they too will die if one does not kill the other. This central scenario – two protagonists in a fraught situation in which they attempt to achieve different goals (with their lives at stake) – can be traced to the time-critical ordeals confronted by Jack Bauer in
24 but with a crucial difference: there is no obvious way out in narrative terms. In
Saw each protagonist is aware that pursuing their goal will result in pain, injury and death to someone else, and the film shows that the protagonists prefer inaction and self-mutilation to the harming of a stranger/ other. Hence, in its dramatic scenario, the film indexes an equivocal post-9/11 reality. Whereas in
24 this scenario is shown to be fraught – Jack Bauer is often in the throes of an existential crisis – it is also always clearly scripted to contain a preferred course of action: torture is a last resort, but it is necessary in order to find information that will save countless innocent people. By contrast,
Saw’s tagline – ‘How much blood would you shed to stay alive?’ – points to how conflict takes place within a series of bounded choices, none of which offers an easy ethical or moral course of action; as such, the film functions as allegory for a complex view of the ‘war on terror’ that emerged in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib. That a dark underworld (akin to the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib) is shown beneath and within the safe suburban lives of the film’s central characters conveys how the two distinct realities of the US homeland and the ‘war on terror’ are thoroughly interdependent.
Released in 2007,
Rendition sought to draw public attention to rendition flights and the clandestine outsourcing of torture. The film is based on the true story of Syrian-born Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was placed on a rendition flight to Syria, where he was imprisoned for one year and subjected to torture before being released without charge. Directed by South African Gavin Hood, the film was part-funded by Participant Productions, which was also involved in the production of
Syriana. By 2007 rendition flights had become a regular occurrence. Between 2001 and 2007 the CIA and allied intelligence agencies detained over 3,000 individuals worldwide and transported them to ‘black sites’ in countries where torture was permitted; the number of ‘erroneous renditions’, such as that experienced by Arar, has not been recorded but is likely to be high (see Rejali 2007: 504).
Responding to the news that a US citizen has been killed in the suicide bombing shown in the film’s opening sequence, CIA director Corinne Whitman (Meryl Streep), whose character is a cipher for the hawkish initial responses to 9/11, authorises a rendition order with the words, ‘they got one of us’. However, Whitman’s standpoint is called into question through a layering in of multiple points of view, in particular that of CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal). Freeman is shown in hospital after the suicide bombing with the blood of a fellow American on his clothes, in a long-held shot that allows the viewer time not just to register Freeman’s anguish but also to see alongside him the injured civilians who have also been caught up in the bombing. Later, Freeman directly refuses to consider the dead CIA colleague one of ‘us’, stating that they were not friends and thereby refusing the allegiance expected to exist along national lines in favour of a more reciprocal relation with the other (significantly, Freeman is in a relationship with a North African woman).
Tasked with overseeing the interrogation of rendered Egyptian-American Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), Freeman becomes increasingly frustrated and cynical as he realises that the torture is not working, indeed that it is precipitating a cycle of violence that is actually counter-productive. The film’s mid-point consists of a hiatus where all the characters, including Freeman, are shown in moments of introspection. In these sequences, a strong noirish contrast drops faces into half-shadow, signalling moral quandary and the high stakes in determining future courses of action within a scenario in which there are no easy choices. After a period of soul-searching, Freeman acts on his conviction that rendition and torture are unethical and at the cost of his own career arranges for the release of El-Ibrahimi.
Fig. 17: Acknowledging the suffering of the other: Rendition (2007)
A distinctive feature of
Rendition is the space given to the film’s other characters. Freeman’s personal journey, for example, is mirrored by the experience of Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon) as she struggles to discover what has happened to her husband. In ways comparable to
A Mighty Heart (2007), Isabella is shown to be a woman capable of rational action, political lobbying, resilience and resourcefulness. In this respect, the film moves beyond the tendency observable in post-9/11 cinema to attribute agency to male protagonists only. The motives of the suicide bomber, Khalid El-Emin (Moa Khouas), are also presented in some detail (his brother died under torture and interrogation by the secret police), and in telling his story, and showing him victim to both social deprivation and manipulation by a clandestine fundamentalist group, the film figures terror in relatively human (and knowable) terms. The film also humanises the head of the secret police, Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor), who is shown conducting his brutal work while also wrestling with mundane family problems, in particular his daughter’s refusal to agree to an arranged marriage. Through its cosmopolitan approach to point of view the film extends screen time to an American other (Anwar is an Egyptian citizen with a green card) and to a Third World other, in this case, a suicide bomber politicised by the brutal treatment of his brother at the hands of the secret police.
40In cross-cutting between Cape Town, Chicago and Washington, DC, as well as North Africa,
Rendition also attempts an ambitious mapping of geopolitical space via international air travel, rendition flights, long-distance telephone calls and intertitles that place the viewer in discrete (but connected) national contexts. A steely-grey Washington, DC, appears to stand in stark contrast to a sun-burnished North Africa, marking a clear divide between the west and the Arab world; but the film then undermines this neat separation as the brutal work of waterboarding and electrocution is shown to have consequences far beyond the North African prison in which it takes place. On a number of occasions the conventional markers that might be expected to denote a transition from one time frame or geographical location to another are not deployed, producing moments of disorientation as characters appear to have slipped from one realm to another. The effect of this (and the film’s elliptical narrative structure) is to collapse the safe distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between the US and the wider world: here the film shares some formal characteristics with
Syriana, whose tagline, ‘Everything is connected’, might also serve to sum up the organising principle in play in
Rendition.
It seems at first that the film’s multiple perspectives and locations are ordered according to the conventional rules of continuity (with characters inhabiting different locations at the same time). However, a pivotal sequence at the film’s close has Abasi (in search of his daughter Fatima (Zineb Oukach), who has run away from home with terrorist El-Emin) climbing the stairs to El-Emin’s apartment. At the same time, seemingly, Fatima descends the stairs. The viewer expects the two characters to meet, but when this does not happen it becomes apparent that they are ascending and descending the stairs at two different moments in time. What has thus far been presented as two parallel narrative strands is revealed instead to be a contemporary action intercut with an event from the past. With this information, the viewer is able to work out that the bombing that opens the film is, in fact, the work of El-Emin and that Fatima has been killed in the same explosion. The film’s structure here points to the way in which actions will have (often unforeseen) consequences, with Abasi’s role as torturer of El-Emin’s brother resulting eventually in the death of his daughter. Not only this, but Abasi’s attempt to trace Fatima has in fact been futile, since he is not preventing terrorism (in a ticking-bomb scenario) as the narrative has momentarily led us to believe, but is actually only dealing with its aftermath. The implications for Abasi’s character are clear enough, but perhaps this play with narrative structure can be read more ambitiously. For much of the film the viewer is made to feel that they are immersed in the kind of dramatically charged and time-critical situation that typifies television shows like
24. As already noted, these situations tend to show that it is necessary to be violent towards one person (usually a terrorist) in order to ensure the safety of innumerable others; torture is shown to be necessary, to work and to be in the interest of the greater good. The narrative twist in
Rendition actively challenges this logic, with the events under investigation being shown to have already happened, and with the act of attempting to prevent them using violent means furthering the likelihood that they will be repeated. As such,
Rendition’s complex structure contrasts markedly with the caesura that the events of 9/11 are usually deemed to represent, suggesting instead a continuity of violence, with both sides locked into an escalating struggle.
The multiple perspectives and complex non-linear narrative can be contrasted with the closed, claustrophobic construction of World Trade Center with its hemmed-in point of view (victim, victim’s family, rescuer) and clear narrative resolution (rescue, survival, resolve to wage war). As such, Rendition can be seen as a response to Susan Sontag’s (2003) request that Manichean constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the bracketing off of 9/11 from history, should be resisted and that this act of resistance must address issues of cosmopolitanism (and the interconnected world) and the vulnerability of those in positions of (economic, social, physical) disadvantage (see also Brassett 2010). Similarly, Judith Butler counsels that it is necessary to ‘emerge from the narrative perspective of US unilateralism and, as it were, its defensive structures, to consider the ways in which our lives are profoundly implicated in the lives of others’ (2004: 7–8). And, reflecting on the different ways in which the commemorated dead of 9/11 and the uncounted dead of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere are valued, she asks: when is life grievable? (Butler 2009). Butler’s question points to the ways in which value is placed on life differentially across social and geographical territories, something to which Rendition also seeks to draw attention. Although earlier films had been inflected with the desire to make this inclusive ethical gesture – the acknowledgement of culpability and otherness in 25th Hour, the dynamic multicultural and multivocal depiction of New York in Seven Days in September – Rendition addresses the issue as a central element of its story and via its innovative narrative structure, making it an important post-9/11 film. Describing the post-9/11 novel, Versluys observes that there is a move from books that shift away ‘from the perpetrator-victim dichotomy, which the trauma paradigm implies, to a triangulating discourse in which the confrontation with the Other is the central concern’ (2009: 183). Rendition allows us to make a similar observation in relation to post-9/11 cinema in the latter part of the decade.
A note of caution must be sounded, however. Although there is no suggestion in the film that the CIA will self-correct – Freeman has very little agency and must disobey orders, losing his job as a result – the ending shows El-Ibrahimi being freed. Freeman contacts the media, implying that the story will surface and policy will be changed (in reality, Maher Arar was not released because of a conscience-stricken CIA operative and nor was his story widely reported in the press). In this redemptive gesture
Rendition shares much with a film like
All the President’s Men, which suggests that the press is a key check on the excesses of a malign imperial presidency. Indeed,
All the President’s Men provides a touchstone for a wider hopefulness that the system contains the mechanisms to allow it to self-correct.
The Green Zone (2010), which is scathing in its depiction of the Iraq War and the issue of WMD, makes a similar move, with Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon) turning whistle-blower and leaking a report to a journalist to salvage credibility for the system. By contrast, the pessimistic resolutions of
Syriana,
The Quiet American and
The Constant Gardener show individuals accepting that they have very little agency and retreating from any attempt to change things for the better. This desire for a way out sits with the maintenance of the status quo and is consonant with the fact that the public debate about the legal, ethical and practical matter of torture did not become subject to the exacting ethical rigour demanded by Sontag and Butler. While
Rendition went some way to depicting the issues in their complexity, the subject of torture arguably remained open to recuperation and revision on behalf of the conservative ideological discourse.
As already noted, Abu Ghraib became a focal point for protest against the use of torture. Organisations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union and the International Justice Network and left-liberal websites such as the Huffington Post, Salon and The Nation combined with the New York Times and the Washington Post to offer substantial coverage. Seymour Hersh explored how responsibility for the torture resided in the high offices of government (2004b), while Jane Mayer’s investigative journalism (2008) and Philippe Sands’s legal expose (2008) traced the complex web of political and legal rulings that allowed a torture regime to originate at Guantánamo and spread to Iraq, Afghanistan and ‘black sites’ in North Africa and the Middle East.
In addition, a number of political documentaries sought visual means to convey the large amounts of data, leaked documents and complex legal backstory circulating around the torture debate.
Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) tells the story of Dilawar, an innocent Afghani taxi driver who was tortured to death at Bagram prison in Iraq in 2002. The film pieces together the testimonies of military police, military interrogators and the journalists who uncovered the story in 2003 (when, as Julia Lesage reports, the
New York Times ‘sat on the story for a month and then buried it on page A14, running it on March 4, 2003 under the headline, “US Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody”’ (2009)). The film shows how, over the course of five days, Dilawar was suspended in a stress position and his legs repeatedly beaten, leading the coroner to rule that Dilawar’s legs had been ‘pulpified’ and would have needed amputation had he survived (ibid.). In its sustained presentation of legal documents and handbooks and the revelation of the consequences of Dilawar’s death for his family, this film challenges the view that Guantánamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib were simply necessary evils where well-trained interrogators practised ‘torture-lite’ or, to use Rush Limbaugh’s formulation, that the interrogation techniques amounted to little more than fraternity-type hazing rituals.
Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris and released in 2008, can be seen as a further contribution to consciousness-raising around the events at Abu Ghraib.
41 The film might be understood primarily as a kind of ideology critique: it seeks, using the conventional techniques of documentary as well as a number of innovative practices pioneered by Morris, to bring together four audiovisual components – still photographs, interview testimony, re-enactments of events recounted by the interviewees and an orchestral score by Danny Elfman – to get beyond the version of Abu Ghraib established in relation to the infamous photographs.
In contrast to Hersh’s claim in the New Yorker that ‘the photographs tell it all’, Morris believes that the photographs misled people into thinking that the military personnel in the images were to blame for the torture. Standard Operating Procedure can be seen as an extended attempt to move through the photographs to the complexities of the event from which they originate (see Hersh 2004a). For Morris, the meaning of the photographs is not selfevident – they, in his words, ‘reveal and conceal’ (from DVD commentary) and it is necessary to subject them to forensic scrutiny in order to illuminate the complex reality they elide. Indeed, an organising principle of the film is that the photographs must be both placed back into a complex context (to reground their meaning in relation to the event they depict) and subjected to an iconoclasm that submits everything about them to suspicion. As Thomas Austin notes, Morris sought to make ‘visible some of that invisible whole – context, setting, background’ (2011: 347).
The main method by which the film goes about this is the juxtaposition of the photographs with testimony and re-enactments. However, the mode of presentation of the photographs is also an important facet of the film’s aesthetic. They are displayed in a variety of ways, often with a white framing border, sometimes as singular items, sometimes in groups; at times they move across the screen in arrays, which gather chronologically or in terms of a specific location. Often they are held up to the viewer for as long as ten seconds, allowing considerable time for contemplation. On occasion they are shown under the steady gaze of one of the prison guards. This formal attempt to unsettle preconceived senses of the photographs is extended through the inclusion of photographs not shown in the media and the representation of well-known photographs with any cropped-out elements recovered. Released from their media context thus, the images slew off preheld assumptions and connotations and their meanings are reconfigured. This can be seen in the sequences that show Military Intelligence Specialist Roman Krol peering into the camera lens to analyse a picture showing him and several other soldiers throwing water and Nerf balls at detainees. As Benson-Allot notes,
Krol’s scrutinizing gaze highlights the role of the apparatus in the interview and reminds the viewer that his interview is both an image and an engagement with images. Krol bridges the roles of viewer and subject during his photographic analysis, thereby reminding the viewer that he and Morris’s interviewees possess a similarly imperfect interpretive relationship to the Abu Ghraib photos. (2009: 41)
With their meaning already destabilised through the form of their presentation, the photographs are subject to a forensic parsing by Special Agent Brent Pack, a military investigator. During the court martials of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, Pack was tasked with extracting the metadata from the 12,000 digital photographs in order to place them on a timeline. Benson-Allott notes that Pack was asked to decide
whether a given interaction constituted a violation of military protocol or ‘standard operating procedure.’ Pack’s job authorized him to plumb only digital – not human or historical – depths; he could look inside a photo for its metadata but could not read anything into the faces of its subjects or infer causal relationships. (2009: 42)
Briefed thus, Pack judged that by far the majority of photographs depicted standard operating procedure rather than criminal acts, thereby making one of the film’s strongest points: what we see is routine. In
Torture Team Philippe Sands offers a detailed description of the interrogation of Detainee 063 at Guantánamo Bay in 2002, an account that is similar in many respects to the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (2008: 5–15). Sands’ description confirms Morris’s point that the photographs generally depict what is actually permissible (and indeed, encouraged). By demonstrating that the guards improvised within a bounded set of legally specified behaviours, embellishing but generally not transgressing what was deemed permissible, the film serves to refute the ‘bad apple’ claim that a few untypical individuals of bad character had invented a dark fantasy inflected with the mores of hard-core pornography and sadomasochistic sex and that this bore no relation to wider practices.
Fig. 18: Parsing the photographs of prisoner abuse: Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
But Standard Operating Procedure also signals to the viewer that Pack’s belief that he is being objective should by met with scepticism. Pack professes to adhere only to the facts, but he regularly judges the guards’ expression and notes, judgementally, that they seemed to be enjoying what they are doing. The film also uses computer-generated imagery (CGI) to illustrate the process of parsing the photographs, which appear to at first to conform to neat timelines and an orderly narrative of cause and effect but then dissolve ‘into streams of binary code that finally render their contents invisible’ (Benson-Allott 2009: 42). So, in the film’s presentation of, and sceptical distancing from, Pack’s investigation, we have an oscillation between the pinning down of meaning and the constant and recursive questioning of it.
The photographs are also brought into a complex relationship with other elements of the documentary. The most dramatic of these is the human face in close-up. Linda Williams notes that ‘all of Morris’s films concern judicial processes. If they are not about actual trials, they are about the process of bearing witness to disputed facts’ (2010: 34). Central to this courtroom metaphor, as Williams observes, is a desire to enter into the record what lawyers call ‘demeanor evidence’, the effect of a witness’s or defendant’s appearance under this close scrutiny (2010: 37). But the metaphor of a witness standing trial is not completely apt. As Lesage points out, by the time the prison guards appear in Morris’s film they have had
their memories, rhetoric, and public personae filtered through their prepared and delivered testimony at over a dozen military tribunals and at their own or others’ courts martial, as well as numerous media appearances and news interviews. We might also add that they have learned to inhabit the version of events the US public prefers. In the process, they probably developed a version of events that they came to believe and prefer. (2009)
Faced with this, Morris searches for techniques that can capture demeanour evidence yet also point to the ways in which the interviewees are often caught up in elaborate constructions of self. To this end, Morris used a specific apparatus called the Interrotron, which, via an adapted two-way teleprompter, allows him to appear on a screen in front of the interviewee’s field of vision. The interviewee looks directly at Morris and the camera as he asks questions and records the interviewee’s response. The effect is a mediated but direct and intimate interview process that creates apparent direct eye contact between interviewee and viewer of the documentary. Williams notes, ‘as viewers we see the interviewees’ eye movements and facial gestures as they encounter, or resist encountering, Morris’s own face and eyes in the lens that films them’ (2010: 36). As such Morris
repeatedly explores his human subjects’ self-presentation, and how they ‘narrate themselves’ even via self-deceptions; but these performances of self are not simply collected and relayed, they are arranged for viewers to assess and evaluate, with some shown to be more plausible than others. (Austin 2011: 345)
Analysis of two witness testimonies will serve to indicate how this apparatus operates. The first is from Lyndie England, a diminutive female prison guard seen holding a prone Iraqi prisoner on a leash in one of the most widely circulated photographs. Williams notes that
the microphysiognomy of England’s face as revealed in the Interrotron does not dramatically catch her lying, nor does it catch an admission of guilt. But her very difficulty phrasing the description of what she saw – ‘unusual…weird…wrong’ – combined with her initial avoidance and then final acceptance of eye contact when she admits that it was ‘OK,’ illustrates the mind-set that made it possible for such acts of abuse to be understood as ‘standard operating procedure.’ (2010: 40)
For Williams, the complex series of looks requires England to be considered neither villain nor misunderstood victim, but instead displays how she, at one and the same time, excuses herself by claiming that ‘the example’ of abuse was already set and indicates with her face that she feels culpable for not resisting the example set. As such the image is one of ‘an ethical being wrestling with her acquiescence to an unethical situation’ (2010: 40).
Fig. 19: ‘Demeanour evidence’: Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
The second testimony is that of Sabrina Harman, the prison guard who appeared next to the corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, smiling and giving a thumbs-up. As she appears in Standard Operating Procedure Harman is articulate, unapologetic and open. She is also able to submit further evidence: her letters to her wife in which she states she is shocked about what is happening at the prison and claims that she is seeking to behave ethically by documenting events. The layering of Harman’s plausible testimony with the bleak and seemingly irredeemable photograph in which she appears leads Benson-Allott to note that
Both photograph and film hold some truth – al-Jamadi really did die, and Harman really did pose with his body – but neither can show why the photograph was taken, what Harman was ‘really’ thinking, or who killed al-Jamadi. Furthermore, the images’ juxtaposition reminds the viewer that both are staged for the camera, and by offering these two contrasting moments of direct eye contact together, Morris seems to reconsider his own ability to master the history of Abu Ghraib. For if Morris is indeed suggesting that Harman possesses no better understanding of the woman in the photo than any other viewer, then he is also acknowledging the limits of his documentary. (2009: 41)
In both England’s and Harman’s cases, then, Standard Operating Procedure ensures that ‘the familiarity of the images is both invoked and repudiated’ (Austin 2011: 345). We are asked to reimagine the scenarios depicted in the photographs as complex and multi-fold, often veiling even darker realities.
While the different perspectives build to create a complex picture,
Standard Operating Procedure does not include the views of any of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. As Austin notes, although the film ‘manifests outrage and concern at the plight of the prisoners, it reproduces and repeats their de-individuation into nameless, voiceless objects’ (2011: 351). By way of contrast, the HBO documentary
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007) is more expansive, including interviews with prison guards, military intelligence personnel, legal figures and scholars. The film also features interviews with former Iraqi prisoners who – appearing anonymously – testify to their experiences of torture. One of the prisoners states:
The most painful thing for the inmates there were the cries of the people being tortured. One day they brought sheets to cover the cells in order for no one to see anything. They began torturing one of them, and we could hear what was happening. We listened as his soul cracked. The sound of his voice really twisted our minds and made our hearts stop. We later learned that this man was Manadel al-Jamadi.
The third structural component of Standard Operating Procedure – after the forensic treatment of the photographs and the nuanced handling of the interviewees – is the use of re-enactment. This aspect of the film has been subject to criticism for its ‘over-aestheticised’ style. However, Morris has responded by stating that the re-enactments were designed not to look like the rest of the material in the film, noting that they are not asking an audience to suspend their disbelief ‘in an artificial world that has been created expressly for their entertainment; they are asking the opposite…to study the relationship of an artificial world to the real world’ (2008). Formally speaking, this principle is consonant with the wider operation of the film. The re-enactments relate only obliquely, one might say dialectically, with the acts depicted in the photographs. They do not show the events depicted in the well-known media images, instead layering in telling details that extend the visual sense of the prison and the events therein. Benson-Allott, for example, notes how the film details the dust motes that ‘circulate around Gilligan’s sensory-deprivation hood’ and ‘lingers on the golden skin of a man’s back as MPs pull him from an isolation cell on a leash’ (2009: 43). In another scene the dogs used to threaten the prisoners are reduced to slavering jaws shot in slow-motion. These details destabilise the known images and the rehearsed testimonies, hovering somewhere ‘between display and concealment’ (Austin 2011: 348).
Standard Operating Procedure might be accused of relativism – destabilising meaning around the event to allow multiple interpretations and thereby dulling the imperative nature of the images: the way they express that the abuse is ethically wrong and should be subject to punishment. But this is precisely what enables the film to depict realities as slipping, folding one into the other, like the torture chamber of
Saw situated beneath a comfortable suburbia. This can be seen most clearly in the way the film handles the depiction of the interrogators who subject Manadel al-Jamadi to the beatings that lead to his death. These interrogators appear in the film almost as ghosts, and Lesage notes that
Fig. 20: Re-enactment as juxtaposition: Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
both interrogators and their prisoners were officially ghosts…the interrogators often made themselves known by only a first name, clearly fabricated, and did not log in their prisoners. As one of their spectral detainees, Manadel al-Jamadi was thus not officially there. (2009)
The overall effect is that the film tries to make the secret and clandestine visible, while acknowledging the intentionally shadowy operating procedures explicitly sought by policymakers, and evidenced by the Rumsfeld quotation at the beginning of this chapter. As Thomas Austin notes,
to this end, photographs are sometimes used in the film to undercut or challenge statements made in interview, while at other moments interview testimony clarifies or complicates what the still images appear to show. In other words, there is no consistent epistemological hierarchy governing the two sets of sources. (2011: 347–8)
As a result of this indeterminacy something of
Taxi to the Dark Side’s emphatic, fact-based political commentary is lost. Yet something is also gained: there are no easy answers to be found in the prison, in the photographs, in the words of those accused of the crime. As Benson-Allott puts it, the relationship of the Abu Ghraib photographs to history ‘is still tenuous and representational’ and understanding them requires movement into the data and the documents, the legal rulings and the responses to and causes of 9/11 (2009: 44). Ultimately, this is a dialectical juxtaposition, not a postmodern intertextual gesture.
In his book The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo, an expert witness on behalf of one of the officers court-martialled for their behaviour at Abu Ghraib, traces how systems can produce unethical behaviour and how the scapegoating of low- and mid-level soldiers at Abu Ghraib has distracted from an analysis of how the military command and policymakers created a situation in which abuse was encouraged and permitted (see 2007: 324–80). Following Zimbardo, the film demands that accountability be extended beyond the vilified MPs to the operation of Abu Ghraib as a military/penal institution and to the larger context shaped by the ambitions, policies and practices of US foreign policy under Bush. Seen in this wider context, Standard Operating Procedure suggests that, as Austin puts it, ‘the “bad apples” were the fruit of a poisoned tree’ (2011: 348). There are correspondences here with the way 9/11 pointed to unethical behaviour in the middle realms of US society – financiers, lawyers, and so on – with the principle of complicity collapsing the overly neat differentiation of the innocent and the guilty (see Sands 2008: 30). Films such as 25th Hour, Syriana and Rendition seek to scrutinise societal structure and the relationship between this structure and those with power; although it does not pursue such a tactic itself, Standard Operating Procedure points to the necessity of this type of cultural production.
With the exception of
Hostel, the films described in this chapter form a cycle of forceful, politicised and aesthetically adventurous attempts to critique the worst excesses of the torture policies (and their wider ramifications) and to encourage a critical view of the ‘war on terror’.
42 David Simpson writes that, following the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal, ‘the neat distinctions between them and us, between civility and barbarism [could not] be mouthed as confidently as they once were’ (2006: 110), and that
the photographs do not show that we are all monsters, nor do they confirm that the tortures can be blamed on a few morally delinquent soldiers; they open a disturbingly ambiguous territory inbetween, where the question remains a question not yet resolved and not easy to resolve. (2006: 117)
The cycle of torture films described here, appearing through the latter part of the decade, explores this ambiguous territory. They may be open to criticism on some points – for example, the drift of the
Saw series away from the difficult ethical scenario that was its point of origin, the liberal redemptive implication that the press will save the day in
Rendition and the neglect of the victim’s perspective in
Standard Operating Procedure – but like the films described in chapter one this cycle acknowledges and explores a range of challenging realities in a manner that is almost without precedent in the US cinema.
There is a temptation here to pursue a teleological line of argument: that this cycle of films marks a trend in popular culture that – ten years after 9/11 – indicates that the US is now more willing and capable than ever before of questioning the ‘relationship both between self
and other and with(in) the self’ (Weber 2005: 2). Douglas Kellner, for example, claims that a progressive and liberal vision of US national identity had, by the late 2000s, come to dominate, and that in this new cultural climate the success of
Slumdog Millionaire (2008), an account of life in the slums of Mumbai, India, at the 2009 Academy Awards ‘constitutes a rejection of the narrow nationalism and chauvinism of the Bush-Cheney years [and marks] a yearning for diversity, complexity, critical vision, and sympathy for the marginalized and oppressed’ (2010: 12). As we have seen in this chapter, there are some grounds for this claim. Indeed, it might feasibly be argued that a dynamic and critical popular culture provided a context for the Supreme Court to rule that the Haynes Memo (condoning the use of torture) had no legal standing, which in turn led to Barack Obama rescinding all legal cover for interrogation techniques deemed torture in a memo dated 22 January 2009 (see Sands 2008: 293). Although Guantánamo Bay remains open at the time of writing (described as ‘a legal black hole’ by Sands (2008: 22)), the films discussed in this chapter, alongside important works of investigative journalism and myriad online repositories of leaked documents, successfully challenged the use of torture and cultivated a critical sensibility that has required policymakers to move cautiously.
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