Word: abu
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...fictional features. Errol Morris is acutely aware of this defect, and he likes to liven things up by bringing what Hollywood has always called ?production values? to his docs. His new movie, Standard Operating Procedure, about the shocking photographs that revealed the horrific conditions at Iraq?s Abu Ghraib prison circa 2003, offers a compendium of these techniques...
...manner that is distinctly at odds with the essential grubbiness of the extant stills and videos of the actual events at the prison. Finally, there are the ghosts - shadowy evanescent figures that are supposed to represent the unseen forces that ordered up the torments inflicted on the Abu Ghraib prisoners. All of this seems to me at odds with the very sordid story Morris is trying to tell. It distracts from, even vitiates, the moral power inherent in the film...
...When Morris?s better self - the earnest and morally alert documentarian takes over - the film is very much better. He particularly wants to destroy the notion that the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib were solely the work of a few low ranking ?rotten apples.? In his interviews with them they largely come off as young, ill-educated, and very suggestible - almost as premoral as children - and he is not without a certain human sympathy for them. Their unseen higher-ups wanted intelligence (particularly about Saddam?s whereabouts) and did nothing to discourage any behavior that would degrade...
...Implicitly - and correctly - Standard Operating Procedure - wants us to remember that Abu Ghraib was not an anomaly, an isolated incident that can be apologized for, swept aside, blamed on the ignorance and stupidity of the ?other ranks? as the British have always rather contemptuously called their dogfaces. It was, and it should remain, a central symbol of what is surely the most immoral and misguided military adventure in American history. All I am arguing here is that Morris?s manner of relating this story is very often quite inappropriate to its substance. It is a sordid and appalling tale...
...Instead of the “few bad apples” blamed when the prisoner abuse first came to light over the Abu Graib incidents, it is clear that those highest in the level of command sanctioned specific methods of prisoner abuse. While the meetings referenced in the ABC report revolved around interrogation at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, according to the Vanity Fair piece, “[An] August 2006 report of the Pentagon’s inspector general concluded unequivocally that techniques from Guantánamo had indeed found their way to Iraq...