There have been two documentaries thus far that deal specifically with the actions
taken by the group of military police that resulted in the infamous actions and photographs
from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The first, Alex Gibney's acute Taxi to the Dark Side
, focused on the death of an innocent taxi driver at the prison, a high point in
the atrocity exhibition that Vice President Dick Cheney explained away by saying
"We have to work… sort of on the dark side." Using a case study of sorts, Gibney
found a singular key to our current disregard for humanity (not to mention the Geneva
Convention) and rode his expose to an Oscar win last February.
The second film comes from the venerable Errol Morris, who was last seen polling
the political landscape through a heart-to-heart with ex-Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara in his excellent The Fog of War. His latest film is called Standard Operating
Procedure, and, unlike Gibney's film, the director attempts to take the whole mess in while
focusing on what the photographs from Abu Ghraib were really being used for. In his
usual fashion, Morris does away with voice-over and allows the interviewees, many
of whom were part of the MP squad pictured in the photographs, to use their answers
to sculp the unheard question.
The torture is old news but that's half the point: suspected terrorists, one of which
was given the nickname "Gilligan," were put through agonizing forms of torture and
depravation in the hopes of getting information on Al Qaeda, terrorist attacks, or
future attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Waterboarding, sleep depravation, sexual humiliation,
electrodes: that these things happened is not up for debate. Morris believes, with
due evidence, that these things were admitted to call the hounds away from more
devious, unseen acts, namely incidents like the one depicted in Gibney's film.
Stylized by Danny Elfman's sinister-yet-playful score and reenactments of certain
stories, Morris adds a whole gallery of rogues to his menagerie of human amazements.
The most fascinating of them is Lynddie England, the infamous Specialist who posed
for pictures with a prisoner on a leash and again while callously pointing to detainees
forced to masturbate. Only three years after being court martialed, England has transformed
from the skinny paradigm of decayed morality to a scorned and hardened single moth
er; she resembles something like Clarice Starling if she opted for the night shift
at the Piggly Wiggly instead of Langley. When she talks about her one-time fianc�e
and father of her son Private Charles Graner, you can see the black hole where her
sense of right and wrong use to be.
A casualty of the occupation in her own right, Morris paints England as the poster
child for youth-in-conflict. Does this mean that Morris is cutting these guys a whole
lot of slack? Most definitely, but his argument boils down to just that: the schematics of
the current military call for less intelligent people to be wielded by more powerful,
shameless people to carefully execute an undisclosed agenda. To Morris, this group
of "bad apples" is a battalion of patsies. The argument is considerably shaky and in
somuch as Bush, Cheney, and their cronies deserve a portion of blame, the writing's
on the wall.
Engrossing if inexcusably flashy, SOP feels like a stepping stone to a more undeniable
account of Abu Ghraib and its mirroring effect on our torture culture, the way documentaries
like The War Tapes and Iraq in Fragments felt like links leading to Charles H. Ferguson's devastating No End in
Sight. As Hollywood scrambles to comprehend the effects of this war on soldiers (Stop-
Loss), family (In the Valley of Elah) and media (Redacted), Morris stays glued to the military
institution and its unending ability to sacrifice "our boys" for the "greater good."
It's no picnic: You try convincing people that our heads of state are basically a
collective of pointing fingers.
Everyone with the flip-flops.
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