I recently finished reading the book 'Standard Operating Procedure' by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. It is based on the interviews that were made for the Errol Morris film of the same name.
It is about, if you do not already know, what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Why did US military personnel abuse prisoners there and why did they record there actions in photographs.
The story is truly terrifying in what was allowed to happen.
I don't though want to write specifically about those events or even this specific book here. Instead I am just starting to collate some notes and thoughts on an idea about the reporting on this.
In fact, I first read about this outside the daily press in Seymour Hersh's book 'Chain of Command'.
Within this book this episode is a much smaller part of the whole, an exposure of the then current state of Iraq and America's 'adventure' there.
What I want to record here now is some notes and thoughts on the words around this story, where they are, what can be built and can they lead us into further insights into what happened, why it happened and what we now do to stop it ever happening again.
The heart of stories is words. Even though pictures play a key part in this tale the pictures themsleves carry a baggage that makes the viewer complicit in some way. Many of the pictures taken by the soldiers were published in newspapers across the world but in these two works of reportage they are not reproduced. One of the images is hinted at in the cover of the SOP book, but otherwise their content is described in words.
Does this rob them of their power to involve reader, investigating the story through these texts? By relying on words do the authors in fact, properly, remove the artefacts, the pictures from the story and in fact present us with the terrible actions that took place to physicalise what was going on in the minds of these soldiers?
Can we generate meta texts around the documentary evidence and reporting around this stroy that will tell us more? Could it be used to bring in people who would otherwise not engage with the story and therefore not encounter the possibility to learn from it.
In the Seymour Hersh book reference is made to the report by General Antonio Taguba, the Taguba Report. This report, though marked as Secret / No Foreign Dissemination has in fact been available to the public worldwide since at least May 2, 2004. (You can read it here).
This is just the first step of an experiment. I call it 'This is our algorithm' wanting to look at truth and stories when as work online.
update:
Here is the wordle visualisation for this, 'Testimony of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld'
and here is the visualisation for the Wikipedia page on the events at Abu Ghraib
More soon hopefully.
