Errol Morris has been working on a documentary about the photographs of Sabrina Harman smiling over a dead body at Abu Ghraib. It's an important and interesting investigation into what he argues is a miscarriage of justice aided and abetted by the horror evoked by this picture. Horror, he argues, which plays on some of our most primal human understandings of the meaning of Harman's smile. Morris's argument is based on his investigations and many interviews with the people involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal, and are all well footnoted in the blog article he wrote for the NY Times this week. The heart of Morris's argument goes something like this: 1) The institutional military system at Abu Ghraib was corrupt; 2) the deceased man in the photo was murdered, most likely, by interrogators; 3)the photo of Ms. Harman was taken largely out of curiosity and in a series intended to document the murder and its cover up; 4) Harman's smile is not genuine joy, but camera cheese. As Morris concludes:

"And so we are left with a simple conundrum. Photographs reveal and they conceal. We know about al-Jamadi’s death because of Sabrina Harman. Without her photographs, his death would likely have been covered up by the C.I.A. and by the military. Yes, at first I believed that Harman was complicit. I believed that she was implicated in al-Jamadi’s death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile. Abu Ghraib is all about the blame game. M.P.’s blaming M.I. M.I. blaming the civilian contractors. And everyone blaming the 'bad apples.' Harman didn’t murder al-Jamadi. She provides evidence of a crime, evidence that this was no heart attack victim. She took photographs to show that 'the military is nothing but lies.' At the very least, to show that she had been lied to by her commanding officer. It is now our job to make sure that her photographs are used to prosecute the people truly responsible for al-Jamadi’s death."

Morris's brilliance is his ability to create a sense of gravity around the meaning of Harman's smile.  It's a catchy way to engage the story because of some very basic features of our humanity. For instance, we tend to smile when smiled at. Part of the reason this picture evokes such horror is because we realize Harman is smiling over a corpse. We associate her smile with sadistic pleasure over a death she must surely be responsible for. The picture doesn't give us the context. Rather, it enraptures our basic primal fears and anxieties about death, which, in the end, must find a scape goat. That scapegoat, inevitably, became Ms. Harman. Morris's point is that when you look at the evidence, she and her fellow guards realized what had happened to the detainee that had died. Upon seeing the man's injuries they realized he had not died of a heart attack as they had been told by their superiors. From Harmann's diaries from this time, it is quite clear she was not happy, nor without disgust concerning the lies being propagated by the system at Abu Ghraib.

But the picture remains. Why the smile? Morris brings in a facial expressions expert to prove that it is not genuine joy expressed in the picture, but rather a "say cheese" smile. This is consistent with Harman's own testimony. It is also consistent with they way they went back to take more incriminating evidential pictures of the body which had been beaten to death, then cleaned and covered up in a body bag on ice in a padlocked room.

There are a couple of further points which I'd like to make that Morris comments on, but doesn't draw out their political consequences.

The Power of the Personal Camera

The first concerns the use of the camera at Abu Ghraib. In my Master of Arts dissertation, The Urban God of Surveillance Society, I argued that the surveilance camera distances and fragments insofar as it takes the position of an all seeing deity and demands unique identification markers to single people out and police them. Furthemore, the experience of being under surveillance, as Michel Foucault points out, creates a kind of subjectivity. It shapes the way we think about ourselves in relation to others. The technology was applied to prisoners in the past and still is. Now, however, it is applied to the wealthy insiders who can afford to live in the recently Disneyized city centers and gated communities around the world.

I am not a Luddite. Although I question the uses of surveillance in our cities, and argued for the need to develop communal practices that foster solidarity and community in our cities, I also argued that the personal camera may be a way in which the more sinister aspects of surveillance societies can be challenged. I specifically cited Abu Ghraib in this example as a concentration camp which was radically reversed by the use of a private camera. The surveillance camera fosters distance, fragmentation, and disengagement. However, the camera in the hands of the individual fosters reciprocity, emotion and engagement. The angles are from below as people look at each other and take pictures. They are not above, but at a human level. So too, they are close, detailed and able to capture emotion much better than the surveillance camera typically does. Thus, in the center of a concentration camp like Abu Ghraib, people caught in a dehumanizing system were able to humanize it. 

One concern here was that the personal camera was also used to exploit at Abu Ghraib. Wasn't it just part of the surveillance system in the hands of the guards? This is, in some sense true. But, in fact, as Morris argues, without Ms. Harman's photos the system would have covered up a murder. Furthermore, she was in fact as horrified by what had happened as we all were. She came to realize that a cover up had occured, and they went back to document it. Morris points out how her fake cheesy smile proves it.

Radical Homo Sacer

The second issue I want to raise concerns the term OGA. OGA is a military abbreviation for "Other Government Agencies."  As Morris puts it:

"The C.I.A. and various associated groups are referred to in the military as O.G.A. – Other Government Agencies. Curiously, 'O.G.A.' also refers to prisoners not 'logged' into the system, prisoners without identification numbers. The fact that they are not logged into the system rendered them officially 'not there,' even though they were. Another term captures their status of 'being there' and 'not being there.' They are called 'ghosts' – ghost detainees and ghost interrogators. Many soldiers refer to Swanner’s interrogation of al-Jamadi as 'an O.G.A. interrogating an O.G.A.' – preserving the sinister double anonymity of the scene in the shower room.

This is a really important point. OGA refers both to groups like the CIA, but also to prisoners not logged into the prison, but who are clearly there. Morris interviewed a fellow who came into the prison and had too learn its procedures. Upon asking about detainees not on the books, he was told they did not exist in the prison, i.e. they were not there.

Another way to talk about OGAs is in terms of an extreme form of homo sacer. This is a term Georgio Agamben's develops for the political identity of those who are not given full existential rights as citizens, but nonetheless are still people and are not to be killed. The prisoner in Guantanamo Bay is a kind of homo sacer, insofar as the laws of the United States do not fully apply to them. They can be held without trial, for instance. The prisoners in Abu Ghraib, were, in a sense a kind of homo sacer as well. They existed in a no man's land with limited legal rights such as those ensured by the Geneva Convention as well as military imprisonment laws, but little else. Because of the "state of exception" under which they are held, it becomes possible to begin questioning the degree to which they should be protected as full human beings. They category of citizen becomes a stand in for their existential status more fully. It makes sense then, that questions about torture are often couched in terms such as special treatment. Special treatment for special kinds of people stored in special no-man's-lands. Torture is wrong, but are some forms of interrogation possible for special cases? Killing is still wrong, but does it really apply to the people who don't really exist? Out of the context of Abu Ghraib or Guantanimo Bay, these questions seem absurd. And yet, they become possible precisely because of the political categorizations applied in these circumstances.

The OGAs are, therefore, a kind of radical homo sacer. Because they are not listed on the records, they do not technically exist under whatever law or convention which might apply to them.

What I find interesting about the radical category of the OGA is that it applied both to captor and captive. This seemed to create a kind of biopolitical zone for these OGAs to work and do their business within. No one was supposed to die. This was off limits. And yet, because they all had been given freedom from the constraints of a recorded existence, exploitation and eventual death was sure to occur. Why? Because once the law is gone, all people are left with is the pressure a life can take. All we are left with is the biology, the flesh and bone. There is no intrinsic value of the person given to them by God or a legal system which assumes a law giver. People become things to be exploited.

Questions for Today

The creation of sacred antinomian zones where people don't fully exist is important to pay great attention to for a number of reasons, but two stand out to me at the moment:

Firstly, because the creation of homo sacer is a pattern which we see time and again. When do genocides happen? How does it become possible to destroy an entire race or category of person? The first stage is they have to be given an in-human status. Their existence under the law has to be eroded, changed, and or removed. This is what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany.Those that didn't recognize it quickly enough paid with their lives. It continues to happen however, to refugees around the world. Just this week in South Africa, residents lashed out at refugees flooding in from Zimbabwe and other oppressive regimes and war torn countries. The lesson here is simple, if you live in any society without full rights under the law, you are vulnerable. When the chips are down and people start to look for scapegoats to appease the loss of their job, rising food and fuel prices, etc. foreigners, the not fully real citizens, often pay. It'd be nice if this didn't apply to other western countries as well, but we only need to look at the human trafficking records to note that whole categories of enslaved people are being exploited all around us. The first step to adequate response is to give people, no matter their circumstance, full political and ontological status. Just becuase a person is a prostitute, does not mean that they can be overlooked, discarded, or simply flitered out of the snazzy down town into some seedy suburb nobody cares about.

Secondly, the creation of homo sacer, raises a question concerning the value of a strictly legal conception of rights and citizenship. In other words, when the law becomes the basis for a phantasy deity, a law giver, then once the law is removed from certain people, they lose their existential value. No God can save them. Without the protection of the law, people don't fully exist. It's like when you go to get a government certificate like a passport or driver's license and you are asked to provide identification. You don't have it because you are there to get it. Suppose your house burned down and you lost all identification and couldn't remember you proper numbers? You'd have a serious problem of existence at that point. Could you get health care? Could you hold your neighbor accountable if you have no legal status of your own? In other words, you become the immigrant, the homo sacer. It's important to imagine because I think most of us consider our existence to be self grounded. However, legally and politically it may not be. At least, this is a question that is raised by events at Abu Ghraib, and, as well, whenever immigrants are exploited or abused around the world. Is the law enough? Or do we, in the end, need a more thoroughgoing account of the intrinsic value of the human person that goes beyond their legal status? How do we ensure that such value is accounted for in our legal systems?

Certainly, we can assume that whenever homo sacer is created in our societies, it should be challenged and questioned before the consequences of such a status are lived out as they inevitably will be. But so too, we must be careful not to become complacent with the fiction that the law alone can protect us. Laws are made precisely because they have already been broken. They are retrospective of our account of the human conditions of the day. What is needed therefore, is an account of human existence which is grounded irregardless of what a person does or where they are located in any particular legal system, be it Abu Ghraib, South Africa, or, in our own cities and suburbs.