Standard Operating Procedure - La verità dell'orrore

This disturbing documentary causes one to ask: is the U. S. military populated by a bunch of degenerates masquerading as soldiers? Is the U. S. military depicted in this movie the same U. S. military that was welcomed as liberators during World War Two or has the U. S. military iterated to the point that it is now completely unrecognizable from its past? Abuse of authority is an old story but when it is officially sanctioned and then covered up, then that is altogether another story. Hasn't the U. S. military ever heard of the Nuremberg War Crime trial? Yet this same military directed its lowest ranking personnel to commit the grossest criminal acts and when the whole thing was uncovered refused to take responsibility, instead opting to scapegoat those who were stuck with having to carry out the orders. What kind of leadership is that? There's a saying: S%$# flows downhill and what happened at Abu Graib prison is proof of that. Where did the soldiers get the idea that you could torture prisoners? Where did that come from? What kind of culture would produce people who think that making people sexually abuse themselves is acceptable ... and then gloat about it? The photos shown in this movie speak for themselves. The United States did not fight Nazi Germany just to adopt the procedures associated with the SS, but at Abu Graib that is exactly what happened.

One other thing. What this documentary reports is another example of what happens when amateurs, in this case reservists, are asked to perform military duties for this they have no training or professional experience. But even that does not explain the total breakdown in discipline and the willingness to engage in repugnant behavior that they knew was illegal and improper.

In 2004 the media was full of accounts of the abuse, torture, and even murder of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison by Military Police. Photographs surfaced depicting prisoners naked and wearing cloth hoods, and being forced to masturbate, stand on boxes for fear of electrocution, and forming human pyramids. Twelve soldiers were convicted, and the commanding officer at the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was demoted to the rank of Colonel. Errol Morris' documentary Standard Operating Procedure attempts to examine the atmosphere surrounding the abuse, the people involved, and whether it was all down to a few "bad apples", or if it was reflective of the American military as a whole.

Morris keeps his authorial influence to a minimum, instead allowing his subjects to speak for themselves. He has interviewed several of the soldiers involved, including Lynndie England, who can be seen in many of the photographs smiling, pointing, giving a thumbs up. She and the other soldiers interviewed describe, with remarkable candour, what it was like living in Abu Ghraib prison, their relationships with each other and the prisoners, and the events and tensions surrounding those incidents depicted in the photographs. It all paints a picture of the prison as a dark and stifling environment, one just waiting to bring out the worst in people.

The real centrepiece of the film, though, are the photographs. Even four years after they dominated every front page and bulletin, they have lost none of their power to appal and disgust. Some, like the picture of a man forced to stand, arms outstretched, on a box with a cloth bag on his head, are surreal. Others, like a photograph of Sabrina Harman giving a thumbs up over a dead prisoner, are simply disturbing.

And hovering above all of this are the OGA, or Other Government Agencies, an often used euphemism for the CIA. It was during the CIA-led interrogations that the most heinous of human rights infractions were most likely carried out. But there are no photographs of these incidents. Standard Operating Procedure raises the point that it is these individuals who should have received the full brunt of the punishment, but it was simpler to lay the blame on lower ranking officers like England and Harman.

It is here that the main point of contention with Standard Operating Procedure arises. It is true that no one above the rank of Staff Sergeant was convicted. And it is true that this should not be the case, that those higher-ranking officers who let this abuse play out under their noses should be held accountable. But Morris tries to divert too much of the blame away from those who were convicted. While England, Harman and the others were just following orders and living in a deeply affecting environment, they are also human beings endowed with free will. They could have said no at any time, and just walked away.

That Standard Operating Procedure raises these arguments means that it is worthy of our time. It presents the facts as perceived by those involved, never itself commenting or judging. It leaves that to us, so that we can make up our own minds. So that perhaps we can learn from the mistakes made by others, and prevent them from happening again.

Standard Operating Procedure (2008) ***1/2

What's in a picture? They say its worth a thousand words, but how many words are what's not in a picture worth. How about thousands of pictures? That conundrum is one of the major foci of Errol Morris, the eccentric genius documentarian's new project, Standard Operating Procedure. Although I was not engaged as I was with Morris's other works, Standard Operating Procedure is still a brilliant and fascinating look at the Abu Ghraib photo scandal.

Morris interviews through the interrotron numerous members of the staff at Abu Ghraib prison. They give their thoughts on their complicity in acts of torture, and reflect back on their experiences. One of the film's major attractions is Lynndie English, that now infamous young woman so maliciously captured on film.

What comes across most intently is that they were just doing what they were told. Those orders always come from off camera left or right. No one above Staff Sergeant was ever charged with anything. This is a point the documentary tries to drive home. In any bureaucratic structure, the big dogs never take the fall. You always sacrifice your little men, your pawns. If people knew what was really going on at the top, they would most surely revolt, or at the very least make a stink, and that would be it for you.

Morris interviews one person who claims she took pictures because she knew it was wrong, to show the world. Is she telling the truth? Well she also discusses how it was "kinda fun" sometimes. She is probably guilty and innocent on all counts.

Morris delves into his subject matter with his usual detective style. He says very little, and of course never ever dares show his face on camera. He only prompts from time to time. He has a style that is uniquely his own in the documentary world. I did not find Standard Operating Procedure to be on the same level as say The Fog of War or Gates of Heaven. But then again how many are? This is a more than worthy addition to the Morris repertoire.

The well-known documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who received an Oscar for his 2003 study of Robert McNamara and Vietnam 'The Fog of War,' has put the Abu Ghraib scandal under a microscope, but the result is too limited a picture of events.

Morris' film describes and shows the humiliations, the nude prisoners cuffed in stress positions or forced to masturbate or pile on top of each other with bags or women's underpants on their heads; the man they called "Gilligan" in the fringed blanket with the conical hat standing on a box with fake electrical wiring to his fingers; the howling dogs terrifying a squatting naked man and biting another's leg; the corpse of a man beaten to death packed in bags of ice.

The images, both stills and some fragments of videotapes, have a dramatic and quickly sickening effect. The circumstances of their taking is thoroughly explained. But the result is disappointingly narrow and obsessive, because Morris has allowed the low-ranking Americans implicated by the pictures, the majority of them concerned only with their own fates and future, to be the dominant voices of the film. The exceptions are a crude but more experienced interrogator, a precise but morally numb military investigator, and the angry general Janis Karpinski who was scapegoated because she was commander of the MPs.

Rory Kennedy's 'The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,' produced for HBO last year, has already presented all this information about the photo scandal--together with the larger context Morris has left out. Alex Gibney's 'Taxi to the Dark Side' thoroughly explored the larger implications--the responsibilities that go all the way up, the distribution of prison abuses throughout Afghanistan, Iran and Guantánamo, the violations of international law and the inadequacy of torture as an interrogation device. By specifically focusing on the beating and death of the taxi driver named Dilawar at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan Gibney showed much more detail than Morris about the specifics of one prisoner and the full extent of the physical brutality of US interrogators and guards. Anyone coming to Morris' film from Kennedy's and Gibney's will find it incomplete.

'Standard Operating Procedure' doesn't follow up on any Iraqis. Perhaps because Morris' mostly unheard questions were aggressive, his talking heads are always on the defensive, repeating that they were only "softening up" the prisoners as instructed. Lynndie England protests that she was in love with her boss, Charles Graner, and just did what he said. They do admit their process included sleep deprivation, hypothermia, loud noises, and also, when they lost patience or just felt like it, random physical abuse. We learn from the more experienced interrogator that his young associates were useless with high value prisoners. We also learn that no worthwhile information came out of interrogations at the prison. Karpinski explains how heavily overpopulated her prisons became, any suspects once held hard to release.

Morris commits several serious stylistic errors. He introduces fake basement-tape video reenactments (a device he has used before) to augment the visuals of the Abu Ghraib abuses--close-ups of "prisoners'" bodies, blood dripping on a uniform, keys going into a lock--so that after a while you aren't sure what is real and what is fake. The genuine images needed no enhancement, and this confusion is a terrible mistake. The score by Danny Elfman with its heavy-handed drumbeat sounds introduces frantic melodrama, also superfluous and in bad taste.

In fact Morris' material, which ought to have been allowed to speak for itself, is permeated by the banality of evil. The words of the MPs, including Megan Ambuhl, Javal Davis, and Jeremy Sivitz, as well as, most notably in this context, the two women amateur photographers, Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman, are notable for their lack of affect. There is no drama about them. Apart for one or two shaky expressions of doubt, awareness that all this wasn't right, especially on the part of Sabrina Harmon, writing to her "wife" Katie back home, they tend to speak as people going about what they believed to be their jobs; doing what others did and what everybody knew was being done at Abu Ghraib. Except, it seems, General Karpinski, because she was traveling from one prison to another, and says the ugliness was hidden from her. Perhaps it was. There's not much effort to question or puncture any of this testimony.

The film's title refers to the army investigator's conclusion that the majority of the photographed humiliations and punishments were "Standard Operating Procedure" and only certain scenes of physical injury could be classified as documenting crimes. This indulgence is something Morris does not explore further, however. 'Taxi to the Dark Side' goes much more thoroughly into the issue of torture. The distinction between torture and humiliation Morris alludes to seems less important than how the whole pattern of sordid conduct at the prisons get started, a topic 'Standard Operating Procedure' doesn't investigate. We have just had President Bush's admission that he knew and approved high-level meetings inside the White House on harsh interrogation tactics. Morris does not set the Abu Ghraib scandal within this larger framework.

We do hear that children were imprisoned and that there were children raped by prisoners and the prisoners were beaten and injured for that. We're briefly told that methods were transferred to Abu Ghraib from Guantánamo. It's all prefaced by a description of what a disgusting place Abu Ghraib was when the MPs and other American staff came to live there--with constant bombardment, because, in violation of international law (but we are not told that) Abu Ghraib was not behind the lines. This is presented elsewhere by some as mitigating circumstance. The low-ranking Abu Ghraib scandal scapegoats were not only just following orders (or "S.O.P."); they were under stress. Stuff happens. Here again, Morris doesn't connect the dots. Some will like that. The much admired, often awarded Morris is a sacred cow. But this time his result seems more repulsive than effective.

As someone who spent the majority of his adult life in the military, this documentary was especially disturbing.

It's not as it there is anything new here. I saw Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, a better picture, and I am sure that I will see some of this again in Taxi to the Dark Side, or at least I am told I will. It is not that this is new or surprising, but that it needs to be seen and remembered as much as the Holocaust.

That is not to say the murder of six million Jews stands equal to the abuses by our soldiers in Iraq, but that we need to remember this and make sure that we do everything we can to prevent it from happening again.

The professionals will tell you that there is no useful information that can be obtained from tortured prisoners. They will say anything to make you quit. So, there is no excuse for what happened here. It was just people reverting to their animal instincts.

The biggest shame, of course, if that no one above the rank of SSgt went to prison. That is just the way it happens. The troops are scapegoated and the officers are reassigned.

The method used by director Errol Morris in telling this story was unique and really added to the film. It needs to be seen by everyone.