The infamous photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees (some of them innocent of any crime) by American MPs at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have become iconic imagery of American military shame, displayed so many times that they have begun to lose their shock value.  Errol Morris returns to these photographs, which were taken from three separate cameras and freely shared with the servicemen and women posted at the prison, as exhibit A in his investigation what happened, how and why. Standard Operating Procedure brings the horror back to the images

Morris interviews five of the seven indicted MPs (including Lynndie England, whose “thumbs up” poses with naked prisoners gave her instant global notoriety) among his numerous witnesses. His technique is unsettling and direct: they look directly at the audience, challenging us to really confront their stories and experiences. Even more unsettling is his use of the eerie cameraphone footage of the MPs with the prisoners which, unlike the photos, has not been dulled by media overexposure. The result is not simply a political documentary. It’s a police procedural, an investigative mystery, a study in perceptions, a portrait in how the media shapes a story and how the government shapes a story for the media. He finds compelling evidence of institutionalized behavior tacitly, if not the explicitly, approved by officers up the chain of command. So why wasn’t it pursued?

For Morris, it all comes back to the photos themselves. The only crimes prosecuted were the ones seen by the public in the leaked photographs: the evidence that shamed the military, embarrassed the United States, convicted the MPs involved, and now stand as the iconographic image of American arrogance and hypocrisy. Eyewitness statements can be contradicted or denied. The photographs could not, and the people in those photos were branded with the crimes. Standard Operating Procedure challenges us to really understand not just what the pictures show but what they don’t show (absence of leadership and accountability, absence of a plan, does not show up in a picture) and to see them in context. And he confronts us with the most important question surrounding them: Do they reveal a crime, an aberration in the system, or standard operating procedure?

Read  the DVD review on MSN here.
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My interview with Errol Morris is now on GreenCine. Here’s a clip from the piece:

You mentioned that you had once been a private investigator yourself. Pack is the detective part of the movie, sorting through the evidence to piece together the timeline, but it’s what the evidence reveals that is most interesting, the parts of the story that are not being covered in the media. Your film keeps returning to the photos.

Yes. They’re at the center of the story. Absolutely.

What I think is so amazing about that is that, through the course of the film, you deconstruct the photos. You interview all these people, you uncover all this evidence from these witnesses, yet the only crimes that were prosecuted were those that were photographed, the ones that had the visual evidence, the ones that were seen by the public.

But it gets even worse than that. I have this essay coming out in the New York Times this week on Sabrina’s smile, the photograph of her with her thumb up, the smile and the body of [Manadel] al-Jamadi. Now I remember seeing this photograph for the first time and thinking, “God Lord, what is this? It’s monstrous.”

She didn’t kill him. A CIA interrogator either killed him or was complicit in his death. The brass of the prison was involved in a cover-up. In the log, he’s described as Bernie, from Weekend at Bernie’s, the body which people have to get rid of. It’s an inconvenience because they don’t want to be, in any way, implicated in his death. He’s the hot potato being shuffled about.

Sabrina takes these photographs as an act of civil disobedience, to provide evidence of a crime. In her letter to Kelly, immediately following this whole deal, she says, “The military is nothing but lies. I took these pictures to show what the military’s really, really like.” And here’s the weirdness of it all. The people responsible for al-Jamadi’s death, the people responsible for covering up a murder, skate. Sabrina spends a year in jail.

I think this is the heretical thing. It’s not just that the photographs direct us in a certain way, but they actually hide things from us. They make us think that we know a story when in fact we don’t know the story at all, or we know the wrong story. It’s endlessly fascinating to me and I would like to set the record straight. That represents to me an incredible miscarriage of justice. Taking a picture of a body to expose the military and to expose a crime, to me, is not a crime. Murder is a crime.

And, of course, none of the trials dealt with that. They were concerned solely with the abuses that were photographed. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, only those crimes seen in the photos that made their way into the media, that had been exposed to the public, were pursued in the prosecutions.

That’s correct. They became very effective symbols, scapegoats, and the photographs helped.

They became symbols, too.

That’s absolutely true.

The complete interview is here. I also review the film here.

The infamous photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees (some of them innocent of any crime) by American MPs at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad have become iconic imagery of American military shame, displayed so many times that they have begun to lose their shock value.

"Standard Operating Procedure"

Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure returns to these photographs, which were taken from three separate cameras and freely shared with other servicemen and women posted at the prison, as exhibit A in his investigation of what happened, how it happened and why it happened. They are the evidence that broke the story to the public and the raw material used by military investigator Brent Pack to construct a timeline of events. But they have since become symbols loaded with meanings accrued over time and media overexposure. Morris challenges us to really understand what the pictures show and what they don’t show, and what they really mean.

Along with soldiers, army investigators, a civilian interrogator, and former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, Errol Morris interviews five of the seven indicted MPs (including Lynndie England, whose “thumbs up” poses with naked prisoners gave her instant global notoriety). They all speak directly into the camera (courtesy of his “Interrotron” system) to confront us directly with their stories. The technique grants them a palpable level of respect and challenges us to really confront them. It’s not that Morris thinks they are merely innocent dupes in a larger conspiracy, but he does believe that their stories deserve to be heard.

Morris is a filmmaker as detective, looking for contradictions, comparing the stories of witnesses, trying to find out the stories that we’re not being told. The result is not simply a political documentary, it’s a police procedural, an investigative mystery, a study in perceptions, a portrait in how the media shapes a story and how the government shapes a story for the media.

Read more »