Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

I've been following the blog postings of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris for a few months now, as well as any news feature I can find about his upcoming film, "Standard Operating Procedure," and book of the same title he co-wrote with Philip Gourevitch.

Gourevitch wrote "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda," the introductory chapter of which is probably one of the best things I've ever read. I read aloud an excerpt from it in college once in my Messages of the Old Testament class when we were debating the act of genocide and whether God still intervenes on behalf of his creations or whether he let's things happen because of free will, etc. Light subject. My reading brought the mood of that 10:30 a.m. Tuesday-Thursday class down considerably, but I never got a chance to go toe-to-toe with the self-righteous Youth and Family Ministry majors who were of the "God Rules, End of Story" persuasion.

Anyway, I pre-ordered the book and am excited about it. "Procedure" delves into the Abu Ghraib scandal and its haunting photographs, but Morris's attention to detail and determination to find the real story will have most anyone rethinking their definitions perception, intention and truth. His latest NY Times blog post revolves around Specialist Sabrina Harman (pictured), who has one of the more recognizable faces from the prison photographers and who was made a scapegoat by the military when they needed someone to blame for the PR nightmare.

She has her reasons for why she would have her photo taken with prisoners and corpses while smiling and giving a thumbs-up, and I like what the facial expressions expert has to say about how Sabrina may be smiling, but she's not happy. But I can't help but wonder what I would have done in her situation, or what anyone would have done. How much does our environment, upbringing, personality, psychological state, etc., influence our actions? A lot, I know, but what about when it comes to those moral issues we all claim we feel the same about? We say we'd never treat another human being like that -- and some of us would likely never get ourselves into the situation of having to decide whether or not to torture someone in the first place -- but how do we know?

One excerpt from a recent New Yorker piece on the book and film got under my skin.

The cat’s head was one of Harman’s gags. She had a kitten that was killed by a dog, and since it had no visible wounds she performed a rough autopsy, discovered organ damage, and then an M.P. buddy mummified its head. They gave it pebbles for eyes, and Sabrina photographed it in various inventive settings: on a bus seat with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie hat, floating on a little pillow in the wading pool, with flowers behind its ears. She took more than ninety photographs and two videos of it. The series, in its weird obsessiveness and dark comedy, has the quality of conceptual art. At one time or another, at least fifteen of Harman’s fellow-M.P.s posed for photos with the cat head; several senior officers and a number of Iraqi men and boys also took the time to have their pictures taken with it. The cat head had become a fetish object, like Huckleberry Finn’s dead cat, which Tom Sawyer admires—a scene that Norman Rockwell illustrated in a folksy print captioned “Lemme see him, Huck. My, he’s pretty stiff!”

The macabre nature of carrying a mummified cat's head around as a joke struck me as an interesting look into her psyche. She might not be the "bad apple" that one of Morris's editors claimed her to be, but was she an Average Jane just doing her job -- doing what was standard operating procedure? Is the cat head trick a sign of the kind of person she was already, or the kind of person she'd become in Iraq? Did the situation of war so warp her and her fellow soldiers' minds/hearts/whatever that the cat's head is more of a warning sign?

We're all a product of our environments; luck of birth is a bitch, but it can't be helped. I'm where I am because of where my parents were when they had me. We're all on different intelligence levels, we all respond to things differently, etc. I believe we're all capable of great evil as well as great good, it just depends on our situations, our level of power and the choices we make -- which all depend on our environments, our personalities, our psychological makeup, etc. Ah, so circular.

Knowing this, I have to ask: Can Sabrina Harman be judged on the same level as I am? As you are? What does it mean to be held accountable for one's actions, and can you really blame someone for the action's they take in a situation you could never imagine?

Morris as the artist taking a closer look at Abu Ghraib has helped me see the situation so much more clearly, which of course means I'm now more confused than ever.

One thing I do know is that Harmon is no worse a person than me. She's just not as lucky as me.