Standard Operating Procedure

Saw Standard Operating Procedure, an Errol Morris documentary. It's about the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. We interview almost all of the principal actors in the by now infamous pictures. We see those pictures again here, almost artistic in their representation of suffering and of the guards' indifference. Morris starts off the documentary with a description of Donald Rumsfeld's visit to a freshly liberated Abu Ghraib. After he sees a gallows, delicate Rummy cannot stand to see anymore and refuses to tour the torture chambers. He leaves, but we know now that the abuses occurred by the (perhaps tacit) approval of his administration (and perhaps even he himself.) Morris suggests that we are perhaps not much better than Saddam.

There's an interesting bit about war being a man's world. The prisoners are forced to wear women's panties to humiliate them. The backwards Iraqis cannot stand being subservient to a woman, but so too, we discover, are the American soldiers. Another parallel is drawn, but this is the last one. The air of moral and cultural superiority sufficiently stolen from the Americans, the film now sets to work on the utilitarian front. A charming but professionally creepy "civilian interrogator" (employed by this weird company) talks about the frustrating loss of information incurred by these amateur kids messing with the prisoners. One of the prisoners, a general, was ready to tell all but was ignored because the kids wanted to shave his eyebrows. After being thus humiliated he clammed up and refused to talk. The interrogator shakes his head at such waste. We are also told that many of the prisoners were uninvolved civilians. Taxi drivers or even the family-members of actually wanted men, being held hostage.

As usual, Morris is more interested in the people behind these stories so, after the preceding low-level condemnation of the events, we hear from the soldiers. Linndie, the woman in the most recognizable thumbs-up-&-pointing-at-wieners picture, is the most interesting of the bunch to me. She is pugnacious and defensive, talking about how she was manipulated. At first this seems like a legal fabrication, but we hear from other people and discover that everyone was lied to, were told that they were allowed to do anything short of killing the prisoners (but of course a few were accidentally tortured to death anyway, we find.) In the media circus aftermath everyone denied responsibility (many denied that anything wrong had even been done at all) leaving us with a national moral failing that was (of course) nobody's fault.

There's another soldier who is an excellent source of accidental poetry. He talks about not being involved, "although some blood did get on my uniform." It's accidental but cute anyway. Each of the soldiers is asked if they regret it and Linndie, out of all of them, accepts the experience. She recognizes that what happened was wrong, but wants to move on, to forget. She is perhaps running away from the experience, but it seems to me that she is more whole than that and that she is embracing it.