The Motivations of Monsters
Captured on film and disseminated around the globe, every American has seen the evidence of our government’s illegal use of torture and humiliation against detainees in Iraq. In her new book Monstering, Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect and contributor to Marie Claire, delves behind the Abu Ghraib photographs to examine not only the Bush administration and military policies that encouraged torture, but also the complex lives of both the perpetrators and victims of these abuses. From Iraqi grandmothers arrested because their husbands were Baath party bureaucrats to teenage boys hanging out at a candy shop when their village was bombed by the United States, McKelvey shines a bright light on the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of detainees who don’t fit the “terrorist threat” stereotype. Torture becomes less problematic if we don’t believe in the humanity of its victims. McKelvey succeeds in demonstrating their humanity.
For Monstering, you interviewed people who had never spoken to the press before, including Lynndie England, the most notorious soldier depicted in the Abu Ghraib torture photos, and Sam Provance, a military intelligence specialist who was stationed at the prison and acted as a whistleblower. How did you obtain those interviews, and how did you convince these individuals to trust you?
The Lynndie England exclusive was probably the biggest one in terms of the global stage. She was real famous; her name recognition was above 90 percent. I got that interview because I went to her house. I sent a letter. So much nowadays is done by email and sometimes by phone. And you miss a lot. It seems more efficient to email people, but in fact, it gets you nowhere. Not only will they not email you back, you don’t really understand it unless you talk to a person. What’s the point of being a reporter if you don’t talk to people? That’s the idea; to go somewhere cool, or not cool, but just to go somewhere. If I wanted to work in my office all day, I’d be a lawyer.
Marie Claire asked me to go to England’s house. I drove and drove to Fort Ashby, West Virginia. I know vaguely where she lived; that she lived near a roadside tavern and that it was near a sheep farm. So I wrote that description down on a piece of paper and then mailed a letter. I waited and was terrified. I sat in this diner and thought, “What the fuck am I doing in this town?” Finally I had to do it, I had to go and talk to the Englands. So I went to the trailer park, and I was afraid there were going to be some dogs jumping out at me. I started looking around for a stick to beat off this imaginary dog. So I went up to the house and I made sure they had gotten the letter, and they had. And it was her mom. I don’t remember what I said, but I showed her one of my articles from Marie Claire, and it worked out.
You write that when you talked to Lynndie England in jail, a faint smile would cross her lips as she remembered the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. As an author, you really avoided judging or even interpreting that behavior. But as a person, what were you thinking when you saw that?
The thing about the smile was really haunting. It was one line in the book, but I thought about it a lot. It has something to do, I think, with the fact that always when I talk to people about these events in Iraq, there’s this laughter—a kind of giddy laughter. It’s a human reaction to horrific circumstances. You’re nervous, you’re anxious, you’re scared, and it’s a release from all of it. There’s always a weird humor to these stories. And it happened to me, too. When I was interviewing this jihadi—this guy who really scared me a lot—after I got out of this interview I was in a hotel room and I just started laughing. I was thinking, “Oh my God, I’m still alive. I’m so happy.”
With Lynndie England and a lot of other people who experienced Abu Ghraib, they laughed at stuff all the time. And it’s inappropriate, and it’s creepy, and it’s chilling, but that’s what people do when they’re under really extreme situations.
You definitely describe a lot of instances of inappropriate humor in Monstering, such as when soldiers tell stories about detainee abuse over dinner and laugh uproariously with their peers. The New Republic recently published a narrative by a soldier serving in Iraq who wrote about soldiers laughing as they made fun of a woman whose face was mangled in an IED attack, played with a dead child’s skull, and killed dogs. The conservative blogs and magazines reacted with outrage, saying he must be lying and attacking him personally. In your book, you describe soldiers horsing around with the corpses of dead animals, even stimulating sex acts with a goat’s head. The bad behavior in the TNR piece is low-key compared to the abuses American soldiers took part in at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq. So what was your reaction to the controversy over Beauchamp’s piece?
It’s nonsense. Those things happen all the time, I’ve heard horrible stories. There’s a sense of distance that you have if you’re in the States and hear about these things, it’s horrifying. If you’re in Iraq, it’s not like you’re proud of doing those things, but it’s what happens—it’s what people do in times of stress. In my book, you understand more why these people are doing these things, but it’s still awful. It doesn’t sound as believable to people when it’s an anecdote in a short piece.
There had been accounts of abuse and torture written down that you’d never read or pick up, because it was all stripped of context. So I thought it was important to describe how each person got into each room to the extent that I could, and what the room looked like, because it would reduce people’s ability to attack it as unbelievable.
You write a lot about how the horrendous conditions in Iraq changed these Americans and made them act in ways that seem unbelievable. In West Virginia, for example, Lynndie England was compassionate enough to have complained about the abuse of chickens at a meat processing plant where she briefly worked. But Charles Graner, the army reservist who was the ringleader of the photographed abuses and is now serving 10 years in prison, was in trouble with the law twice in the States. First, he physically assaulted his ex-wife, and then, he slipped a razorblade into a fellow soldier’s mashed potatoes. Should he have been guarding prisoners, or even deployed to a combat zone?
Of course not. He had a history of violent behavior and he should have been screened out. But instead of being screened out, he was put into this job deliberately, I mean at least according to [former Abu Ghraib commander Colonel Janis] Karpinski. People really gravitated toward him, they looked up to him, and for all those reasons he was put in positions where he had authority over other people. The screening at Abu Ghraib was lax. The military investigation showed that contractors also were not properly screened or vetted for their jobs.
You devote a lot of attention to the plight of women who were held at Abu Ghraib. While you heard from human rights workers that women were raped and sexually abused in the prison, no woman has made a formal charge, perhaps, as you write, because of the increased stigma attached to rape in Iraqi culture. There have also been far fewer images of women prisoners being abused, although there is one photograph of a female prisoner baring her breasts for the camera. So given the lack of public information, how can we raise awareness about the plight of female civilians in Iraq?
There’s also supposedly a rape video that is still missing and may or may not exist. It may be a videotape of a boy being sexually assaulted or raped, because in the military investigations they talk about a contractor accused of raping a boy while a female soldier took images—pictures or videos. Or maybe it’s a video of a woman, I really don’t know.
As far as getting more information, it’s done mostly through interviews. These are most likely interviews the Army Criminal Investigation Command should be conducting, but since they’re not, it’s up to journalists. You have to do that in person. And then you have to read through the swamp, because the sexual assault of Iraqi women has been used as a propaganda tool. There’s bootleg porn out there on it. Of course, there could also be a congressional investigation.
It seems crucial that when it comes to topics like sexual assault in war zones, there should be female journalists tackling these issues and conducting interviews with victims. But there’s a perception that there aren’t enough women journalists covering national security and foreign policy. How did you develop your expertise in this area?
I started by writing human rights stories and a lot of them would take a female angle because it wasn’t being covered. I always wanted to be a war correspondent, but I’m too scared. I thought, if I become a war correspondent, then I’ll smoke cigarettes. That was my trade-off. So I was always interested in those kinds of things; not the hardware part of it, not the tanks, but about war and violence.
There are some women who are doing amazing work in this field. Jane Mayer, at the New Yorker, of course, and Dana Priest of The Washington Post have been leaders. There’s more than you’d expect.
Dana Goldstein is a writing fellow at The American Prospect and a former associate editor of CampusProgress.org. She blogs at her own site and TAPPED.
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Comments
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I would just like to comment on how little this reporter knows about Abu Ghraib and how much sensational crap is added to sell a book.
Thanks for really telling the truth!
— Megan Graner - Aug 5, 09:12 PM - #Megan Graner
I agree with Megan.
Facts without context or history is not truth. It just points to a writer’s being lazy, blinded by their own agenda or a combination of both.
Ms. McKelvey and her interviewer, Ms. Goldstein, will never be anything more than propogandist unless they take the time to do some pertinent research.
Some knowledge in history, demographics and the natures of combat and intelligence operations is necessary for thoughtful reporting.
As far as this piece goes, both Dana and Tara sound like a couple of gossips from the stenographers pool.
— RAGGEDSTEP - Aug 7, 08:27 AM - #The previous comments on this interview criticize the content and statements made by Ms. McKelvey and Ms. Goldstein, yet do not put forward any legitimate arguments supporting these critiques.
I’ve heard Ms. McKelvey speak in person about her new book, the difficult interviews that she managed to obtain for the book and her reasons for writing the book—namely, investigating the hidden or unreported abuses of women and children and those who don’t fit the “terrorist” mold at Abu Ghraib—and I found her insights to be fascinating. In fact, my copy of the book is in the mail right now to my house.
So Megan G. and RAGGEDSTEP, if you feel that this interview lacks truth or “pertinent research,” than put forward in your response what that truth or missing information is. Anyone fool can go on here and say, “Dana and Tara sound like a couple of gossips.” Unless you intend to be taken seriously in this forum, support your claims with some sort of substance.
— Andy Kroll - Aug 7, 10:34 AM - #Andy, first of all, you have to have some understanding of demographics and crime.
An occupying army is made up of mostly young males. That’s that’s the group responsible for most of the violent crime in our own country. So, if you took the 150,000 or so in Iraq, applied it to population groups here, you would be talking about a large city.
Add to that a lack structure that would deter some people from criminal activity, and of course bad things will happen just like they occur here in the US.
So the idea that crimes happen solely due to combat stress,demonstrates a failure to understand context.
As for Lynndie England, she did some bad things after becoming sexually involved with a bad guy. We hear that used as a defense in criminal cases all the time here at home.
I’m still not sure what Abu Ghraib was supposed to be but as an intelligence operation, it was just plain stupid. This sort of ‘caca on the wall’ approach will not get you anything.
Perhaps, if Ms. McKelvey had taken the time to research the nature of a well organized intelligence operation, she could have been more insightful.
In addition to the reasons I stated above, atrocities have alway happened during any war. I suspect that this is due, in part, to the fact that fear and anger are such closely related emotions.
Last but worst, these two fail to explore the phenomena that the large, large, large, majority of soldiers complete their tours without taking part in any atrocity. The very thought never enters their mind.
So, let me state again, this interview was shallow and only seeks to further a political agenda.
— RAGGEDSTEP - Aug 11, 09:32 AM - #