The Wake

A tangled mess of men masked with green military-issue bags crowd the hall. An American soldier stands proudly with his arms crossed, resting on his puffed chest behind the pyramid of contorted bodies. Another soldier, leaning toward the camera, bares an unsettlingly cheeky grin as if she were completely removed from the demented scene.

The photos taken during the fall of 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have given an entirely new and disturbing meaning to the clichéd idiom, “a picture tells a thousand words.”

Starting with these disconcerting photos, (270 to be exact) acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris set out to capture the story outside the frame in his documentary Standard Operating Procedure. The film has already won the Silver Berlin Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival this year. Morris has also accrued multiple awards, including an Oscar for his work with non-fiction films like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War.

In addition to his hardy résumé, Morris has certainly done his homework on this particular project, and after two years of investigation he and his crew have come away with over a million and a half words of interview transcript, hundreds of photos and a unique perspective on the notorious Abu Ghraib scandal.

The perpetrators of the events at Abu Ghraib were characterized by the government as a few bad apples, just some kids misbehaving when daddy government wasn’t paying close-enough attention. But what has become strikingly clear is that those being punished for these atrocities were acting only as they had been taught. They were acting within the bounds of what they knew as Standard Operating Procedure.

The perpetrators, Morris said in his interview, “are people who, rather than at the apex of the pyramid [of power], are at the bottom. The central figures in this story are privates, specialists, sergeants. They are low ranking.”

Morris’ film forces all of us to put ourselves in the position of these soldiers, because in reality, they could have been us, or our brothers or sisters. They were American citizens who volunteered, found themselves in a horrifying prison in Iraq (it was common knowledge that Abu Ghraib was a hot spot for martyred attacks), and were asked to carry out atrocities that they had been informed were protocol at Abu Ghraib and other interrogation sites.

Standard Operating Procedure doesn’t attempt to justify the actions of the seven “bad apples” but more accurately, according to Morris, provides “a context for their actions,” and also attempts to uncover more about the life and character of the accused in order to “capture the moral complexity” of the situation.

Who gave the initial orders, or whether initial orders existed, to torture and humiliate the detainees at Abu Ghraib is still largely unknown. The sentiment that these photos disseminated throughout the world, however, can be felt even now, nearly five years after the photos were taken.

The events of Abu Ghraib prison unfolded before a horrified and shocked American pubic who were subsequently not only embarrassed by the events, but alarmed at the apparent absence of American values outside of country lines.

According to Morris, what seems to irk the American people most is that, “Abu Ghraib and the investigations into the photographs become about us…our values, our society.”

We as Americans have an inherent love for freedom and liberty, epitomizing eagles and announcing loudly that boy, we sure do hate terrorism. But how far will we go to in order to ensure the preservation of these American values? Whose lives are considered disposable in order to protect our own?

Another underlying issue with the photos that has captivated the media is how Abu Gharib detainees were humiliated by being forced to dress in women’s clothing.

Lyndie England, a key figure in the scandal, stands in one photo beaming as she holds a makeshift rope tied round the neck of a prisoner who cowers on all fours. These portraits of humiliation have exposed latent misogyny, homophobia and national arrogance, which are present not only in the U.S. military, but in the U.S. as a whole.

As if the compromising of American values in a disgustingly pompous manner wasn’t sufficient cause for alarm, referring to Abu Ghraib, Morris said, “none of this produced useful intelligence. Nothing useful came out of this place.”

As long as the war in Iraq continues fruitlessly, the U.S. government as well the military will continually relax interrogation rules among many other procedural strategies. Morris observed that, “there is constant pressure to find people that can provide intelligence to the U.S.,” and as a result, prison sizes are growing along with the insurgency.

“There is,” Morris said, “the growing realization, even though our leaders are in a state of denial, that this is not a cake walk, that the mission in Iraq is spiraling out of control.”

A special advanced screening of Standard Operating Procedure will be held April 15 at the Walker Arts Center. The regular release date will be April 25, 2008.