Celebrity Blog: Errol Morris on "Standard Operating Procedure"

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has written a celebrity blog for us to promote his new film, Standard Operating Procedure. Feel free to post any questions to him below and let him respond! -- Ellen

 

I made Standard Operating Procedure because I was captivated by the mystery of the Abu Ghraib photographs; photographs that have been seen by more people than any other photographs in history. The iconic photograph of the Hooded Man on the box with wires attached to his hands has been seen by hundreds of millions people, in the U.S. and around the world. Several other photographs of Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman smiling and giving a “thumbs up” have also been widely shown.

It occurred to me that we all know the photographs, but few of us, myself included, could answer the questions: Why were they taken? What do they really show? Were they simply the result of stupidity – after all, what kind of criminal would take photographs of a crime they were committing? There was a long list of unanswered questions.

You look at a photograph, and you think you have seen everything. But all you have seen is what is inside the frame. But photographs reveal, and they conceal. I remember when I first saw the photographs, how bizarre, how perverted they were. I also remember my surprise in learning that it was policy to use American female soldiers to humiliate Iraqi prisoners, and that many of the pictures were merely reenacting ideas that had come from higher-up. I also remember my shock on learning that Abu Ghraib was not some small operation. We look at the pictures, and it is easy to imagine that Abu Ghraib is one or two cell blocks with a couple of hundred prisoners. This just isn’t the case. By the end of 2003, Abu Ghraib was the center of American intelligence operations in Iraq. Some 10,000 prisoners were incarcerated in what was essentially a concentration camp in the middle of the Sunni Triangle.

The size and extent of Abu Ghraib is just one example of how photographs can mislead us. Quite simply, photographs can serve as an exposé and as a cover up. Without the photographs we would know nothing about Abu Ghraib, We think we know who the real culprits are because we can see them, but we do not see (as Megan Ambuhl, one of the MPs, says in the movie) “outside the frame.”

Details are revealed in this movie (and in the many DVD extras) that were unknown and have never been thoroughly investigated: the use of children as hostages; the participation of many, many military and defense organizations in torture and abuse; the terrible risk from mortar attacks which took the lives of both prisoners and soldiers – violations of the Geneva Conventions on every level and in every way.

It is clear that what happened at Abu Ghraib is the result of policy and not the actions of a few rogue soldiers. But this is not a story about the higher-ups. And ultimately, I am not interested in apologizing for these soldiers or an attempt to excuse their behavior. I am more interested in trying through the pictures and their own words to capture something about who they are. As such, Standard Operating Procedure is a story about soldiers, about people – about what it means to be trapped in a moral and political nightmare. It’s not that these soldiers didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong – many did, and did what they did because they felt it was what they were supposed to do and because it was what they were required to do.

When the soldiers of the 372^nd MP Brigade walked onto the tier for the first time in October 2003, the patterns of abuse had already been well established. We like to think that as we go through life there are clear signposts that mark what is right and what is wrong. But reality is rarely so simple.

There are many theories about why people do bad things. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” the Stanley Milgram experiments on obedience to authority, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. I did not want to put this story into a theoretical structure. I wanted it to live and breathe on its own. I wanted to first look before theorizing. Certainly, one of the most surprising things for me in this story was: how different these men and women were from each other. Each with their own issues and separate concerns. I find it deeply moving to listen to Sabrina Harman, one of the MPs who went to prison, read her letters home to Kelly, her girlfriend. The letters and the interview provide a reminder of the pressures these soldiers were under.

Standard Operating Procedure tells the story of ordinary young Americans, thrust into a complicated world not of their own making. Everyone believes they know what the MPs did but no one knows why. Presumably they went in the army to serve their country and do good, but ended up in the heart of darkness. We hear the soldiers tell their own stories in their own words. Can any of us help but wonder how we would react in a similar situation? -- Errol Morris

 

Comments

[Proud American on October 08, 2008 at 11:16 AM]

Typical leftist boo hoo story....ooooo, we put panties on prisoners heads...boo freakin hoo. While they were cutting off heads and holding them up for the cameras to see, you call what went down here "torture"?? Please, spare me your commie rhetoric: we're at war people, whether you like it or not, we're at war with an enemy who would sacrfice their own children (which, by the way, many have done) to kill any American. Their whole philosophy is to 'kill the infidel' and the infidel is anyone who thinks differently than they do.
Honestly, our country is getting ready to be flushed down the drain and you're still wimpering about the war time treatment of those animals. God help us all!!

[Brian on October 08, 2008 at 12:11 PM]

yeah no kidding. These doods were soldiers. Killing our troops. WHo gives a crap if we put hoods on their heads and had a cute chick point at the peepees? Secondly, I don't want to read this political BS in an amazon blog