Standard Operating Procedure - Errol Morris Zettel at 13:12 on 03 August 2008
Oscar-winning Director Errol Morris (Fog of War) turns his forensic camera on the evidence, the participants and the events in the scandal that was Abu Ghraib the American military prison in Iraq. The abuse, humiliation, torture and probably at least one murder of prisoners over a series of nights in the Autumn of 2003 were photographed by the participants themselves thus providing the indisputable evidence that was to condemn them, the American military, and the Bush Administration around the world. It is the deepest irony that long after the 100s of thousands of Iraqi men women and children blown to eternity by largely American and British forces in Iraq are forgotton, it will be these pathetic, but iconic images which infamous, hateful, and repulsive though they be, that will be remembered longer than the intentional carnage inflicted upon a people ‘for their own good’. Indeed more than one of these hapless victims of a system with a potential for corruption, fully realised on this occasion, suggests convincingly that these salacious, sexually explicit pictures are merely the tip of a mach darker, deeper iceberg of real torture and murder.
Morris’s film wisely concentrates on the people and the pictures. He may attract criticism by those shamed by the publicity his film will attract to these squalid events because, using the photographs as a visual base and testimony of those who were there, he has applied his considerable film-maker’s skills to re-enact the terrifying and horrifying atmosphere of what the hell of Abu Ghraib must have been. Many of these scenes and some of these people make one’s flesh creep. Others convey most effectively, the sense of how thin our veneer of civilized values and beliefs is when exposed to mortal danger, unlimited power over other human beings, immoral and cowardly pressure from an implacable hierachical structure to achieve results, and an absence of effective discipline or accountability of command.
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