Prisoners of Folly and Evil
Errol Morris’s ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ deconstructs the Abu Ghraib photos
By Andy Klein
Standard Operating Procedure might seem like an obvious place for documentarian Errol Morris to go after making The Fog of War, his Oscar-winning 2003 portrait/interview of Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Once again, Morris is dealing with war at its morally foggiest. But his focus here is not merely on the notorious events at Abu Ghraib prison, but on the photographs that exposed a world of abuse and made the American people realize, if only briefly, what the rest of the world already knew – that the Bush administration has brought forth all that is worst about us and has destroyed any claim our nation may have had to moral stature.
Just in case anyone needs a refresher : After the invasion of Iraq, the American forces made a startlingly undisguised symbolic gesture: Having liberated the Iraqi people from the oppression of dictator Saddam Hussein, they took over Abu Ghraib Prison, famous as “Saddam’s Torture Central,” and promptly repurposed it as ... George’s Torture Central. Having already shown its contempt for the bleeding-heart Geneva Conventions in the fancy “legal” footwork establishing the detainee center at Guantanamo, the Bush administration – including, but not limited to, the President, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld – made it clear to the military and the intelligence people that “extreme interrogation techniques” were perfectly acceptable in fighting the War on Terror.
Ignore the fact that the Iraq War, despite the administration’s claims, had absolutely nothing to do with the War on Terror (other than to validate terrorists’ allegations about American intentions). Ignore the fact that the vast majority of detainees at both Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib appear to have had nothing to do with terrorism. Ignore the fact that “extreme interrogation techniques” – a euphemism for torture – have never been shown to produce reliable intelligence. We’re America and therefore Special and Different. The fact that our continental homeland was hideously attacked by outside forces for the first time in almost 200 years justifies suspending all the rules that we expect others to follow under analogous circumstances.
Our response to 9/11 marks our government as the institutional equivalent of a sociopath: We’re the only ones who matter, the only ones who are real; it’s all about us; our 3000 fatalities constitute the Worst Thing Ever, worse than however many million of you wogs out there have been slaughtered by us or others. I mean, you’re not, like, actual real people, right? (Please: Do not write in claiming I’m minimizing the horror or moral hideousness of the 9/11 attacks. What I’ve written can’t be read that way, unless you’re a sociopath yourself.)
As with so many other issues during the last two or three decades, most of the major media, through a combination of frivolousness and outright pro-Republican toadying, upheld the view that we were a righteous moral beacon ... until CBS and The New Yorker spilled the beans about photographs of torture within Abu Ghraib.
At least, that’s how most of us remember it. But the first thing that Morris questions in his film is the notion that these were photographs of actual torture. Indeed, he compellingly argues that the most iconic shots – the hooded prisoner on the box, Lynndie England grinningly pointing at a naked man’s cock, England and then-boyfriend Chuck Graner smiling behind a pile of naked Iraqis – were clearly staged.
Back when his 1989 The Thin Blue Line was released, there was criticism and concern about Morris staging reconstructions of the crime for which Randall Adams was unjustly convicted, using “fictional” moviemaking techniques. But surely no one could conceivably have mistaken these beautifully lit, slo-mo sequences for “documentary” footage.
His liberal use of reconstructions in Standard Operating Procedure is even more appropriate, given the central notion that many of these (and some of the other) photographs were themselves “reconstructions” or stagings. Indeed Graner – who arranged these tableaux and was the closest thing to an evil ringleader among those convicted in the case – was into art and drama in high school, suggesting that the Abu Ghraib photos were his amateur version of being ... a film director.
Even as staged events, the photos reveal an environment in which prisoners were essentially treated as nonhumans. Hitchcock was speaking tongue in cheek when he famously said “Actors are cattle” and then later clarified, “I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.” Graner seems to have taken that to heart, herding his involuntary “actors” into humiliating poses.
In a cover-up that the American public would sooner not be reminded of, no one ranking higher than a staff sergeant served any time for other very real abuses that the photos bore witness to. Most of the film is made up of interview footage with those who were convicted, including England, Sabrina Harman, Javal Davis, and Megan Ambuhl. Also memorable are General Janis Karpinski (who was also scapegoated by being stripped of her rank); Brent Pack, the agent from the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division who assembled the photographic timeline and who blandly distinguishes between horrible abuses that constitute criminal acts and horrible abuses that are “standard operating procedure”; and, perhaps most compellingly, Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator appalled at untrained amateurs who abused prisoners because they didn’t have a clue what they were supposed to be doing.
As always, Morris keeps himself off-camera, only occasionally audible offscreen. But his editing reveals his mixed reaction to his interviewees. On the one hand, he gives them full rein to justify their actions. Thanks to her letters home, we know that Harman was genuinely horrified but at the same time too “nice,” too “likable,” to raise a fuss or refuse to go along with the degradation. Davis is perhaps slightly less convincing; and England is simply out of her depth. Despite our high opinion of our humanity and righteousness, they are all proof of Americans’ deficient moral education, modern equivalents of “good Germans.”
Still, their excuse-making is less loathsome than those French collaborators in Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity who seem to have utterly retooled their memories from capitulation to bravery. Morris has a deliberately disconcerting tendency to hold on the face of subjects after they have finished talking, as the ghosts of self-doubt subtly ripple across their countenances.
Morris doesn’t let them off the hook. Still, he’s aware that these low-echelon soldiers were used to deflect attention from the system that allowed them – in fact, encouraged or even ordered them – to cross the line into that dark place that our leaders have embraced. Jon Stewart likes to compare Dick Cheney to Darth Vader, but it’s impossible to believe that
Cheney was ever an innocent, potentially redeemable Anakin Skywalker. He’s more like Darth Sidious; it’s the young soldiers at Abu Ghraib – seduced over to the Dark Side by powerful superiors – who resemble Vader. And, perhaps to a lesser extent, it’s the rest of us as well.
Standard Operating Procedure. Produced and directed by Errol Morris. With Lynndie England, Sabrina
Harman, Javal Davis, Tim Dugan, Janis Karpinski, and Brent Pack. Opens Friday at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, the Landmark West Los Angeles, and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7.
Published: 04/30/2008
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