Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
Sony Pictures DVD (region 1, 2, 4)
d. Errol Morris; pr. Julie Ahlberg, Errol Morris; ph. Robert Chappell, Robert Richardson; m. Danny Elfman; ed. Andy Grieve, Steven Hathaway, Dan Mooney; prod d. Steve Hardy; cast. Christopher Bradley, Sarah Denning, Joshua Feinman, Jeff L. Green, Daniel Novy, Zuhbin Rahbar (116 mins)
REVIEW EXTRACT FROM TERRORISM IN AMERICAN CINEMA: FORTHCOMING FROM McFARLAND PUBL.
Military Police Brigadier General Janis Karpinski introduces the American agenda in Abu Ghraib prison following the departure of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: General Miller – interrogation expert arrives the next day with instructions to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib, to make sure the prisoners know who is in charge, by treating them like dogs, by preparing them for interrogation by humiliating and degrading them.
The end result of this would see Karpinski releaved of command, less for culpability than for convenience. Slightly more expressionistic than the earlier examination of the cover-up at Abu Ghraib – Taxi to the Dark Side – director Errol Morris’ hard-hitting indictment of American military atrocity and the ethos of torture that became the Bush government’s Christian way of waging the War on Terror in Iraq in advance of the capture of Saddam Hussein relays re-created footage of the infamous Abu Ghriab photographed atrocities with testimony from the military officers and soldiers involved at Abu Ghraib from the outset of its appropriation / commandeering by US MI (military intelligence).
Indeed, it is the elaboration of that horrifying oxymoron “military intelligence” that consumes Morris as documentarian here.
He is evidently horrified by the moral ambivalence (at best) he sees underpinning the ethos of the American military which, as is revealed in the seminal Fahrenheit 9-11, recruits its foot-soldiers / cannon fodder from the ranks of the socially and economically under-privileged and then sends them into situations of such stress and ethical compromise as to erode their conscience and their humanity. Interview footage is interspersed with photographic evidence to chart the ethical compromises to humanism that were sanctioned by the Christian US government through its military intelligence programs, programs so horrific as to reduce human beings on both sides of the conflict to inhuman objects worse than animals. Ritual humiliation, degradation, sexual molestation: such is the Christian morality sanctioned by the American military and which, as this documentary reveals, the Bush government tried to cover up.
While Taxi to the Dark Side was about the irony of US sanctioned torture as a form of terrorism, Standard Operating Procedure is about the reconstruction of the truth of events based on the analysis of thousands of photographs and the distinction between criminal action and due process in the surrounding controversy about the photographs. From the jigsaw puzzle of pictures, the horrible truth emerges: what from a humanist perspective is evidence of abuse is from the essentially Christian Bush government perspective that enables such to occur, standard operating procedure / business as usual. Yet, director Morris is equally fascinated by the enigma of Lyndie England, the woman captured in the incriminating photographs and his interview footage with her reveals the truly abhorrent masculinity that dominates life in the US military. Likewise, the recreated footage of actual “interrogation” procedures leaves no doubt at all about the inhumanity of the authority that would condone such cases, especially when it was revealed that this treatment was applied to detainees of no military intelligence significance in the War on Terror whatsoever.
By the time Morris reveals that much of this atrocity was done simply for show – to intimidate and humiliate the other detainees into obeying prison rules – the intent here begins to show through: the rhetoric of torture that was put into motion by Vice President Dick Cheney and explored in Taxi to the Dark Side was done for no other reason than to degrade and dehumanize any Arab detainee, regardless of whether he was involved in fighting the Americans.
Preparation for interrogation amounted to the ethos of dehumanization, an ethos that will ensure Bush’s Iraq War is remembered as the point where America ceased to be a liberator and became a torturer. It is here that American ideals of justice in their plan to democratize the Middle East, as was President Bush’s avowed intention (following his calling by God to serve in the office of President), is a sham. The actions of US “military intelligence” in Abu Ghraib according to Standard Operating Procedure imply Republican Constitutional ideals of democracy as nothing but meaningless hypocrisy.
Deception is also revealed to have been commonplace – the misleading of authority figures (“big shots”) and the removal of certain prisoners from any official documentation or Red Cross visitation. But what emerges most of all in this unrelenting documentary is the sheer absurdity to the US emphasis on degradation – military personnel putting a suspect into stress positions unaware that he has already been tortured to death, murdered by his supposed interrogators. Most obscene is the sexualization of torture by forcing naked prisoners into human pyramids and instructing them afterwards to masturbate en masse. This “pornographization” of torture reveals the sheer inhumane pathology of these sadists – always seen smiling in the pictures – and is a sad misrepresentation of what is the impetus behind pornography as a genre – the celebration of sexuality. In that, Abu Ghraib is evidence of a US military that reduced the War on Terror in Iraq to the sexual domination, humiliation and oppression of the Iraqi people.
The photographs, the “pornographized” torture, the evidence of the atrocious conduct of US military intelligence in the War on Terror as it was shifted by the Bush government from its true focus in Afghanistan to “unfinished business” in Iraq:
this was the evidence the military authority did not want publicized and did everything in their power to cover-up and destroy, ensuring that only “the little guys” be punished for engaging in criminal conduct beyond that justified by the rhetoric of standard operating procedure, a distinction that makes a mockery of any possibility of there being a truly humanist America post 9-11. Indeed, no-one above the rank of staff sergeant was ever punished with imprisonment for the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and the US government that created the conditions which allowed for what was the “Gitmo-ization” of Abu Ghraib was never held accountable. Accountability and ultimate culpability are, however, subjects implied but unaddressed by Morris in Standard Operating Procedure.
That is the real difference between Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side as documentaries. Morris concentrates on the abuses and their key perpetrators, those dismissed by Donald Rumsfeld as “a few bad apples” whereas Alex Gibney in Taxi to the Dark Side traces the chain of responsibility from these “few bad apples” all the way to the White House. The silence of the military on these matters, the cover-up and the sanction at the highest levels of the Republican Party makes a mockery of any US claim to be acting in the name of freedom and democracy in the Iraq War, the impetus for which, according to Oliver Stone’s bio-pic W. had little at all to do with the War on Terror. On this note, the film concludes with a chilling implication – the infamous photographs are evidence only of humiliation, the mere warm-up to the torture that happened during interrogation, of which there are no photographs – only the responsibility of the good Christians who elected the Bush Government into office, twice.
