Lynndie England and Charles Graner smile, arms around each other, as if on a budget travel holiday to the Costa Del Sol, behind prisoners ordered to form a naked human pyramid. An Iraqi prisoner, hooded and attached to wires, stands on a box in the belief he’ll be electrocuted if he falls off. Sabrina Harman, sporting a Mona Lisa smile, gives the thumbs-up next to the corpse of taxi driver Manadel al-Jamadi.
We’ve all seen the harrowing portfolio of photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib in 2004. But if every picture tells a story, it is not necessarily the story we need to know.
Oscar winning director Errol Morris has, with characteristic pedantry, spent years on the case. The harrowing results of his thorough investigation can be witnessed in Standard Operating Procedure, a compelling documentary film that proves to be even more disconcerting than the book of the same name. (The book appeared earlier this year, co-authored by Morris and New Yorker staff writer and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch.)
Sitting in an Edinburgh hotel on the day after the film’s British premiere, the esteemed filmmaker becomes positively animated when he touches on That Mona Lisa Smile.
“I am fascinated by that photograph of Sabrina smiling,” he tells me. “I am fascinated by the fact that the guy we see in that photo was murdered by a CIA interrogator; that the photo was taken 18 hours after the fact; that Sabrina was told by her commanding officer that this was a heart attack victim. This is a woman who wanted to be a forensic photographer. She went into the Army because she thought she would get money for an education and pursue this career. There’s a bad smell coming from the shower room so she goes in and takes pictures. The thumbs up picture was very early on. It was only after that point she realised she was in the middle of a crime scene. So she takes a series of forensic photographs. The only reason we know about this murder was because of Sabrina’s photographs.”
Her efforts would not be appreciated in the way she perhaps intended. Harmon’s thumbs-up gesture would make her a poster girl for America’s disregard of the Geneva Convention and would ultimately land her in military prison.
“She was in no way involved with the cover up,” notes Morris. “She was in no way involved with the murder. She was lied to by her commanding officers and she imagined herself as exposing the military and a terrible crime that occurred there by taking the photographs. Under a different set of circumstances, she would be given a Pulitzer Prize, not a year in military prison. What is her crime? No one else was ever in prison in connection with al-Jamadi’s death. Her crime is exposing a murder. Her crime is embarrassing America, the administration and the military.”
DROP CAP
Errol Morris has made a career finding humanity in the oddest places. He films oddballs around pet cemeteries (Gates Of Heaven), lion tamers and topiary gardeners (Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control), Floridians who cut off their own limbs for the insurance (Vernon, Florida). He has a reputation for defending the indefensible. (“I would say examining the indefensible,” laughs Morris). His gorgeous biographical portraits of such pantomime villains as Fred Leuchter, the capital punishment engineer (Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.) and former hawk in chief Robert McNamara (The Fog Of War) are a case in point.
“I do like pariahs,” he tells me. “I don’t know why exactly. I’m now calling Standard Operating Procedure the last in my pariah trilogy – Fred Leuchter, Robert McNamara and Lynndie England. I think by focusing on people like this, it’s as if you’re looking at something you’re not supposed to look at. My view about looking at something that you’re not supposed to look at is, says who? And why? It’s almost as if people need stories to be told in one way.”
Morris insists, however, that Standard Operating Procedure is not, like these earlier films, a case of him playing devil’s advocate or contrarian.
“Here are the most famous photographs of our age and no one knows anything about them,” he says. “There are a lot of anti-administration films, many anti-Bush films that have been made and that will continue to be made long after he’s no longer president of the United States. I have strong feelings in that area but I made the movie for different reasons. These are widely seen photographs and no one knew anything about them. No one knew the circumstances under which they were taken. No one really knew the context of the photographs even though everyone had an opinion. If the feeling is we know everything we need to know, that’s fine, but I respectfully disagree.”
The contextual details coalesce into a picture that’s far more troubling than anything in the notorious snapshots. We listen to candid testimony from the ‘bad apples’ – everyone from Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who commanded the M.P.’s at Abu Ghraib, down to the bottom feeding specialists and privates who took the rap for the atrocities committed there. Once such principal offenders as Megan Ambuhl, Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England open up to Morris’ camera, a non-fiction horror movie unfolds.
As Sabrina Harman’s letter to her lesbian ‘wife’ back home put it; “I can’t handle what’s going on. I can’t get it out of my head.”
“I was intrigued by the nightmare quality of the material,” says Morris. “Essentially this is a movie about people trapped in a nightmare. They walked in on madness. On Serena Harman’s first day, she saw people in stress positions, people standing on boxes with hands on their head. She didn’t create this. This was something presented to her. This is a story about how a person deals with something like that.”
Read as a horror movie, it is exceedingly difficult to figure out who the monster is. None of the speakers are willing accept complete responsibility. Lynndie England’s soapy three-way shenanigans allow her to plead that she fell in love with the wrong man. Others claim they were only obeying orders.
“Yes, they passing the buck,” says Morris. “But welcome to the human race. I don’t see these people as monsters, I see them as people. Lynddie England isn’t evil. I don’t see her and her colleagues as innocents. But if I were to draw a scale of culpability they would be very, very far down the list. These are military operatives. They are not unstained or pure. But ultimately soldiers have to follow orders and should not be scapegoated by the people who dictate these policies. They were scapegoated for revealing the systematic torture that was already happening on a broad scale. And the people who dictate these policies are the heads of government of the US and their advisors.”
Certainly, when the film sets about the messy business of determining the line between criminality and military practice, it is impossible not to think of Messrs. Bush and Cheney. In one sequence, Brent Pack, a former special agent with the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, discusses some of the most famous pictures. That man shackled to a steel bed frame with women’s panties over his head, or the one standing on a box with fake electrical wires on his fingers? That’s not torture, he concedes. That’s standard operating procedure.
This aspect of Morris’ film has inevitably prompted cat-calling from the right. “A silly little film,” wrote the folks at the red flag waving Liberty Film Festival recently, “a Barney Fife of the poster boy for the anti-American crowd.”
For his part, Morris insists that the political dimension is secondary to his purpose.
“This is not a campaigning film,” he tells me. “People put this issue to rest because everyone was ready to believe – both left and right - that these were bad guys. They might disagree about why they were bad guys. The right would say they’re bad guys, mavericks, rogue soldiers. The left would say it’s because of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. Still, everyone assumed that they were bad and everyone assumed they knew everything they needed to know. They put them in a box. I just wanted to reopen that box.”
Still, it seems strange that Morris, whose 1988 film The Thin Blue Line served to free an innocent man from prison, has suddenly become the voodoo doll of choice for his former liberal champions. Writing in the Village Voice, Jonathan Hoberman went so far as to call Morris an apologist for torture.
“I do not believe in torture,” says Morris. “Nobody has stronger feelings about the Bush administration than I do. And excuse me, but trying to understand these people, trying to suggest that they are human beings, trying to suggest that we may not completely understand what we’re looking at when we look at a photograph is not the same thing as saying torture is okay. But people can say whatever they want about me. I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
He breaks off and smiles.
“Most of the time.”