Errol Morris’ last documentary film, The Fog of War, won the Oscar in 2004 and paved the way for numerous films focusing on America’s involvement in Iraq and the country’s war on terrorism. With his latest movie Standard Operating Procedure Morris trains the spotlight on the events depicted in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs. Morris conducted interviews with people intimately involved in the situation, and pushed for the true story behind the photos. At the Standard Operating Procedure press junket in LA, Morris discussed the eye-opening experience.
Do the photos signal the end of innocence for Americans?
“I would say the beginning of the end or the end of the end, the two being one and the same in this instance. I think there’s little doubt the pictures are so deeply shocking because they run counter to the idea of what this country is about or what this country should be about. But oddly enough, I think there’s something much worse than the pictures actually, that bothers me even more and says to me something about my country at this juncture in history. The fact that we’re willing to punish a few lowly soldiers and allow all the higher ups to walk away scot-free and we have aided and abetted it. Not a pleasant thought, but in fact we have by not looking further than the photographs. As if the photographs were all there was to say about Abu Ghraib.
Abu Ghraib has never been thoroughly investigated. It’s ironic of course because there were 13 separate investigations. I was writing this essay for the New York Times last night…and I described it like the blind men and the elephant. Each of which is given a piece of the elephant to explore and then collectively asked to come up with a conception of the whole, and they fail miserably. It’s very interesting these investigations into Abu Ghraib, all 13 of them. Taguba looks at the MPs. Fay-Jones looks at the MIs. Schlesinger looks at DOD detainment operations and on and on and on and on and on. Nobody really, really wants to discover anything. It’s almost this investigative filibuster that goes on without resolution, where resolution really isn’t the intended result. The intended result is obfuscation.
But what I find really disappointing is that we don’t see the crimes at Abu Ghraib. We don’t see the people as people, we see them as monsters - those people in the photographs. And the photographs have stopped us from looking further and demanding answers, almost as if we’ve just gone into this state of shock and nothing more is needed. It’s a democracy still and I have still have some residual faith in that democracy. And I believe that part of moving past the stain of Abu Ghraib is confronting what actually happened there. Not scapegoats, but confronting what happened there.”
What did you learn while researching and conducting interviews for the film?
“Abu Ghraib was for all intents and purposes, an intelligence operation. It was the center of intelligence in Iraq. The MPs were there as an afterthought. And one thing the movie tries… There’s so much information dished out – my apologies – but it’s hard, I think, in one viewing even to see the damn thing, but you learn, and I think this is surprising to many people, Karpinski was given the job of reconstructing the entire prison system of Iraq. This is really nuts. The one thing that I believe will be remembered about this war is that we sent a military into Iraq that was untrained, underequipped, understaffed, to fight a war. Karpinski had the job of… Remember Saddam in 2002, the fall of 2002, freed all the prisoners. Immediately the prisons were trashed, much like what happened to Baghdad in the aftermath of ‘Shock and Awe,’ looting, trashing. The prison system of Iraq was for all intents and purposes destroyed. There was no prison system, so they have to build another one. Abu Ghraib was just one prison among many, many prisons, and it was a prison that had been given to military intelligence.”
You tracked down a lot of people involved, but the fact that we don’t have those other people could make it come off as self-serving. What effort did you make to get somebody from the other side of the argument?
“You have the material in the movie, when Brent Pack tells you it’s standard operating procedure, he’s telling you it’s military policy. This is not a violation of the policy that they were given, it’s an expression of it. That in itself is extraordinarily powerful. I am going to write more stuff. I’m going to write my essays if I ever have the time to do it. I wanted to make a movie about the photographs and the people who took the photographs, and the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs. I wanted to make that movie. There are lots of other movies to make. There’s lots of other stories to tell. There’s a story that involves the higher ups.
I think there’s so much anger and so much frustration about the war, they want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail Rumsfeld to the wall. And if I haven’t done it, they’re just pissed off. Like, ‘That’s the job, guy!’ Like, ‘Why are you f***king around with a bunch of pictures?’ Because I actually am fascinated by those pictures, by photography. I’m fascinated by the fact that there are things in front of our very eyes that we can’t see. There’s all the evidence in place, that’s all the question you should ask yourself. How many torture memos would you like to see? 3? 4? Would you like to see 8 or 9? 11? Maybe 17? I’ll pick some prime number. How many torture memos does someone have to put in front of you before you start to think that the administration is promulgating torture? What do you need? What does the public need at this point? What does Congress need at this point? Do you think that this is some kind of strange aberration?
Not everything that happened at Abu Ghraib was directed from the Pentagon or from the White House. Rumsfeld never told Chuck Graner, I believe, to stack prisoners in a pyramid. I don’t think that happened. But all of the policies, policies of humiliation, of sexual humiliation and abuse, all of that stuff doesn’t come from a few rogue soldiers. We know all too well that it comes from higher up and is orchestrated from higher up.”
