For The Good of the Neighborhood

This is a photo from a story I recently reported on Coach Tyrone Green. Mr. Green founded a non-profit, For the Good of the Neighborhood, utilizing basketball to develop strong moral and academic values for kids of all backgrounds living in the NYC metro area. Here his daughter Ashley holds a locket with a photo of her mother, Cookie, as she tells me about life with her dad since her mom passed in April.

My debut in a NYC publication...Queens Tribune...came out on Friday, 18 July 2008:
link is here.

Standard Operating Procedure

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft will testify today before Congress about the Bush Administration's policies on interrogation of the prisoners of war it refers to as "enemy combatants," a title that has given carte blanche to White House representatives - from CIA operatives to foot soldiers - to abuse, torture and kill those accused of terrorism. In prior comments, Ashcroft defended the Bush administration counterterrorism policies and maintained that harsh forms of interrogation -- including waterboarding -- are not torture.

As the torture debate comes again to the forefront of the public mind (or at least of those paying any attention) I am reminded of a film that was aired in the spring, a documentary of the administration's interrogation protocols and imprisonment of Iraqis as seen through the lens of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

In Standard Operating Procedure Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris focuses his camera on the soldiers behind the notorious photographs of prisoner abuse at the American-run prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. The documentary aired in Manhattan on the opening night of the TriBeCa Film Festival in April; after the showing, we got to hear from the filmmaker, who was present for a Q&A discussion.

Founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal as a response to the economic impact on the TriBeCa arts industry in the wake of September 11, the Festival's origins coincide nicely with the intent of Morris' film, namely to address the power of an image to affect the world.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are indelibly branded into the minds of all who have seen either the footage on television or the images that have been reprinted the world over. The same can be said of the photos documenting the abuse and torture of terror suspects by military men and women which first became public in 2004.

The film is not about Washington politics, Donald Rumsfeld or President Bush, except indirectly: no one above the rank of sergeant has been brought to trial, and the higher you go up the chain of command the fewer those punished. Instead, through extensive interviews that become monologues in the film, along with re-enactments of what took place in the photographs to fill-in the back-story, the film's concern is less about politicians than about the power of a photograph to conceal and reveal simultaneously.

Take for instance the photograph of the detainee the soldiers nicknamed Gilligan.

On 5 November 2003, an Iraqi citizen who had been accused of killing an agent from the US Army's Criminal Investigative Division (CID) arrived at Abu Ghraib. Refusing to give his name, the prisoner was handed over to Specialist Charles "Chuck" Graner, an army reservist and corrections officer in civilian life who had no training (or clearance) as a military interrogator.

Graner took a photograph of "Gilligan" standing on a small box, wearing a black poncho and pointed black hood, arms outstretched in a crucifixion-like pose, fingers attached to wires. After already having been stripped of his clothes, forced to crawl on the floor and deprived of sleep, the weary prisoner was told he would die of electric shock if he budged. As it turns out, the wires were not live, it was all a show, and later the prisoner not only survived, but became one of the soldiers' buddies the way a kid once bullied on the schoolyard becomes a buddy of his former abuser when another poor sap becomes the picked-upon. Only in this desert schoolyard, the bullying sometimes ended in death, and being a buddy translated only to a few more scraps of food and freedom from physical defilement.

The sinister-looking picture, along with a number of others, when published first in the New Yorker magazine became a symbol of all that was wrong with the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.

It was the embarrassment to the military of what the photo seemed to portray (officially deemed "abuse" as opposed to "torture" and classified as "standard operating procedure") that prompted President Bush to publicly apologize for "the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners, and the humiliation suffered by their families."

In comparison to the what other Abu Ghraib prisoners experienced, including men who disappeared in back rooms and body bags, innocent children and petty thieves who were held together with the more threatening general population, all living in horrendous conditions (even the soldiers slept in the same prison cells that were once used by Saddam Hussein's henchman to torture and kill dissidents) and were exposed to daily mortar attacks—compared to that, the photograph of Gilligan was a joke in the eyes of the soldiers playing the game.

According to Specialist Sabrina Hartman who was later sentenced to six months in prison, a demotion, loss of pay and benefits and a bad-conduct discharge for her role in what many of the photographs documented, Gilligan wasn't really hurt--it not only wasn't torture, it wasn't even abuse; it was a harmless game.

Hartman speaks extensively in Morris' film, both in person and through what she left behind - through her photographs and via the letters she sent home to her girlfriend. While at times clearly disgusted with the acts she was witnessing and photographing, she also participated willingly in many of them. Fellow soldiers interviewed in the film describe her as abhorrent to violence, including Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, who said Hartman "would not hurt a fly. If there's a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you." What to make, then, of the photos capturing her grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign over dead and mutilated bodies, holding leashes around prisoner's necks, laughing as prisoners were forced to masturbate? Was it just fun? Did laughing at and photographing (making war trophies of) the activities normalize indecent behavior?

Some of the photographs back-up her claim that she was more interested in the forensic investigation of how a prisoner died, or as evidence she could use later to let someone know what was wrong with the situation. But with regard to the notorious photo of her grinning, thumbs-up over the face of a man, bandaged, bloated and bleeding in a body bag of ice her morality and innocence are more suspect. Of this series of photos, including the grinning-thumbs-up one, she says, "I just wanted to document everything I saw. That was the reason I took photos. It was to prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was just lied to." She went back later, alone, removed the bandages from the corpse and made a series of photographs that could be considered forensic in nature, but the one of her grinning for the camera taken by her buddy? There's more to the story than she is letting on.

One of the ironies of the photographs and of the punishment that came as a result of their being published is that in many cases the atrocities they depicted were deemed less criminal than the act of photographing them.

For removing the bandages and taking pictures of the dead guy in the body bag, Hartman was originally charged with the crime of tampering with evidence. Of course, the "evidence" was of a murder by a CIA operative of a prisoner who should have been protected by the Geneva Conventions. The charge against Hartman was dropped only because the government couldn't afford to pursue the death that was evidenced by the photograph. The CIA agents and civilian contractors who dragged prisoners into back rooms without logging them in, who beat this guy to death and then covered up their abuse by bandaging the prisoner and leading him out on a gurney with an I.V. as though he were still alive - for that offense, no one was ever prosecuted.

The pornographic photo-ops of naked men wearing women's panties, forced to masturbate for the camera while hooded and chained, stacked in pyramids or posed in pseudo acts of fornication, became the focus of the administration's outcry (outrage would be too strong a word choice for how the military brass and politicians responded), and served as an easy scapegoat to distract from the more appalling and morbid reality of what went down in Abu Ghraib.

Morris' extensive interviews with his characters manage to provoke revelation and confession. In the discussion after the showing of the film, Morris responded to criticism of his paying people to sit for interviews. His claim: they wouldn't have done it otherwise especially given how successful his documentaries have become - if he's making money, so should they the thinking goes.

"It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them, " Morris said in defense. "I paid the 'bad apples' because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it."

Would Hartman or any of the other soldiers and civilian consultants said or done anything different had they gone unpaid by Morris? I doubt it. And, more importantly, the story needed to be told. If earning a day's pay for talking in front of a camera means we are all exposed to the complexities of what went on at Abu Ghraib, then so be it.

The bigger question is what have we learned from the photographs and the photographers who took them? What did the photographs reveal about what really happened there, or of what went on in the minds of the soldiers who participated?

And how, in the end of the film, could the abuse captured in the photographs be defined as Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)? Where official military doctrine exists, SOPs will usually adhere to the official doctrine - and in a war managed from a distance by the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Ashcroft who explicitly accept interrogation "by any means," official doctrine translates to approval of abuse and torture. Among a group of reservists with little military experience and no military police or interrogation training, SOPs and official doctrine were defined by a combination of what they saw anonymous interrogators from the CIA and private contractors perform mixed with their own base instincts in a screwed-up, nasty hovel of a prison-home-base camp in the middle of the desert.

The film also touches, then, on the question of the complicity of officers and administrators high-up in the Bush Administration in the acts of prisoner abuse and torture when the foot soldiers were told to make a prisoner's life miserable, and when prisoners held by highly-trained operatives left the prison in body bags. Will a war crimes tribunal one day bring the men in suits to justice?

At it's most profound and haunting level, the film asks the question of what in the American psyche allowed the women and men at Abu Ghraib to pull the stunts they did, and what's more, to make photo trophies of it all?

The late Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times Magazine, saw the Abu Ghraib events as evidence of the pervasive sickness of American culture where pornography, violence and an obsession to document and publicize our most personal - even deviant - lives. "Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit," Sontag wrote, "and send the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal."

When violence, pornography, humiliation and killing are acceptable in mainstream culture, whether perpetrated against "enemy combatants" in the Middle East or as urban gang members, addicts or immigrant workers trying to "sneak" into America, we will continue to sell television series like 24 and video games like Grand Theft Auto; we will see more Abu Ghraibs and Gitmos - if soldiers are foolish enough to keep taking the pictures.

And if Ashcroft in his testimony before Congress continues to defend the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanomo and countless other secret interrogation and prison cells around the world, then we know that the sickness in the popular culture of America extends to the highest reaches or lowest depths of our political culture, as well.

Tour de France: A Band New Start?

Tour de France - Brand New Start


As we wake to the first day of this year's Tour de France, the epic three weeks commence amid a mix of excitement, mystery and for the corporate sponsors who make professional cycling possible, at least a bit of anxiety.

The banks, watchmakers, national lotteries, car manufacturers, GPS-makers and restaurants that provide cycling's financial backing in the absence of the ticket sales of other sports have been abandoning their riders in ever-greater numbers in the wake of drug scandals played out on the very public stage of the most prominent cycling event on the calendar. As if to pre-empt or mute the constant buzz, Versus, the sole U.S. television station airing daily coverage of this year's Tour, has created its own buzz, tapping British rock artist Paul Weller to provide a new background tune.

The station's campaign dubbed "Take Back the Tour" includes a commercial spot pairing Weller's tune, "Brand New Start," with footage of past Tour riders played in reverse. All of those included in the advertisement have been associated with the scandal if not implicated, and some who have since returned to the roads after multi-year bans.

David Millar, Alexandre Vinokourov, Ivan Basso, Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, Marco Pantani, Micahel Rasmussen, all of whom have either retired or been stripped of their greatest palmarès, ride back up time trial ramps, step down off winner's podiums and, in the case of the American Floyd Landis, is stripped of his maillot jaune in the commercial's wiping clean the slate.

Cycling is associated with doping scandals more than any other international sport, not necessarily because more cyclists use performance-enhancing drugs than other athletes, but perhaps due to their being one of the first group of athletes to be identified with the habit.

Beginning with the death of Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen at the Olympics in Rome in 1960 (an autopsy later identified amphetamine use as the cause) and burned into the memory of Tour de France spectators when British ace Tom Simpson died on the slopes of Mt. Ventoux in 1967, cycling has endured an unfortunately tragic history with drugs.

No American TV commercial can erase the drug scandals from the memories of fans; only a clean Tour can accomplish that goal. And for the cyclists to ride clean, the race needs to not only get better at detecting doping than the cyclists are at masking it, but also create a more manageable Tour - shorter stages, fewere hors catégorie climbs, and more humane conditions that don't beg riders to dope to survive. The founder, Henri Desgrange, said after the first race in 1903 that his ideal competition would be one in which only one competitor “survived” to finish. The physical demands are excessive in the extreme and the race has always been intended to test man to the limit – this year the course is 3,500km (2,175 miles) with the usual two days only of rest thrown into a three-week onslaught.

When Tour organizers provide less extreme conditions, perhaps then we will witness a clean Tour. And while I'm sickened by the reality that athletes around the globe and across disciplines feel compelled to harm their bodies in order to win, I can't help but be thrilled by this summer's lineup from the Tour to the Olympics even as I hold my breadth in awe and dread. British commentator Phil Liggett speaks for me when he says "There is no place I'd rather be in July than on the roads of the Tour de France."