STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE
Documentary by Errol Morris (Sony Pictures, 2008)

Review by Karin Luisa Badt 

Errol Morris’ controversial  new documentary Standard Operating Procedure consists of riveting interviews with five of the young men and women responsible for the three months of torture at Abu Ghraib. Positioned to the right of a foggy-grey wide screen, the talking heads gain empyreal stature and eerie visibility as each smiles and discusses the infamous photos. In marked contrast to their open, American faces, serene and grinning, we see the Iraqis covered in black hoods, only their naked bodies apparent. The effect is the reenactment of a hierarchy in which the military personnel are humans playing devilish pranks and the Iraqis are headless beasts.  

Yet Morris surprised journalists at the Berlinale premiere by defending these soldiers as “victims” of the media. They received the brunt of the blame, Morris explained, because “the bad apples were convenient to the Bush government.” In his words: “The movie gives them back their humanity. You may not like what they did, but they are still people. ”

While Morris says that he would like us to perceive the soldiers as “still people,” his own film reveals that they themselves did not perceive their “victims,” the Iraqis, as people at all. Emmanuel Levinas argued that the basis of ethics is to regard others as not truly others —“the face is what one cannot kill”—a premise that has been picked up by Holocaust scholars to explain how Nazis were able to commit genocide and torture. Once you perceive your victim as a faceless non-human, dehumanizing policies are possible. Morris’s contribution to the understanding of the Iraq war is to show that the same is true of American soldiers and, by extension, of U.S. military policy-makers.

Sabrina Harman, a grinning blond young woman with girlish curly locks and soft twangy voice, explaining why she gave a radiant smile and thumbs-up-sign in the photo of her cradling the bruised head of an Iraqi corpse, quips: “Hey, when you get into a photo, you automatically smile, doncha?” She adds, in a rather numbed tone, “Look I even got some blood on my uniform. I felt kind of bad.”

Sabrina, like her colleagues, justifies her behavior with a “just following orders” argument reminiscent of the Nuremburg trials: “It’s your job. You can’t walk out of this.”

What Morris does is expose Abu Ghraib as worse than the pictures, those static glimpses of cruelty, were able to reveal. He brilliantly adds the dimension of time; turning to a photo expert who broke the time-codes of the five divergently clocked cameras and came up with a consistent chronology. Hence we experience the claustrophobic day-in, day-out torture of the hooded prisoners over the course of three months. The soldiers apparently were devising new ways to entertain themselves at the prisoners ’ expense around-the-clock. All of this was masterminded by an older soldier, Charles Graner, with whom two of the women were in love.

One of these women is Lynndie England, the soldier who tugged an Iraqi on a dog-leash. In her testimony, she is more perturbed by the charismatic effect Graner had on her than by her own actions. Not only does she protest that she “wasn’t tugging. Look closely, the leash is slack,” she speaks of herself as a manipulated victim of heartbreak. She would have done anything to please Graner and was outraged when she discovers Graner ’s involvement with another woman. “This was going on behind my back,” she explains.

The film concludes powerfully with England’s damning last testimony. Asked if she had any remorse, England responds: “I wouldn’t change anything. If I did, I wouldn’t have Carter [her son with Graner], and I wouldn’t do that for the world. That’s the way the world turns, isn’t it? People stabbing other people in the back. It’s life, you have to live it.”

A moment of silence follows. By ending the film with such a reflective moment on this sobering vision of a dog-eat-dog world, Morris raises the stakes of his films from a denunciation of U.S. war policies to a contemplation of the banality of evil.

I asked Morris if he would consider his film to be a meditation on evil. After all, several of his previous projects, such as the memorable Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (2000), demonstrated a similar fascination with humans who violate the code of ethics to the extreme.

“Evil is interesting and interests a lot of people including myself,” Morris responded firmly. “The phrase ‘banality of evil’ has been used in many contexts. I looked up how Hannah Arendt defined it: ‘absence of thinking/reflection.’ I don’t think this is true of these guys. Not the banality of evil, but confused. Sabina’s letters home express three or four personalities at the same time.”

The difference between “confusion” and “absence of thinking/reflection” is not so clear in the film, as, in reenactments of the torture, we see black snarling dogs let loose to gnaw at the prisoners ’ legs.

Yet it is true that Morris shows these soldiers losing their humanity, which does inspire our compassion. The worst night —the night of the human naked pyramids—is a special night for England. “Was it your birthday?” England is asked. “Yes,” she responds in a subdued tone. “At midnight.” She had not expected to celebrate her twentieth year in this way.

I surmised that Morris downplayed the subtext of evil both to keep the emphasis on U.S. policy for those who would misinterpret the film as blaming the soldiers once again, and also to protect his professional relationship with the soldiers. He was asked how he cajoled these soldiers to speak so openly. He brushed the question aside, with a quick shrug and one-sentence response: of course the soldiers wanted to talk, and he was there to listen. Perhaps they were told that more than gaining an audience, it would be their chance to be humanized. “Of course there would be no movie if there were not these personal narrations,” Morris noted. “Without these people, there is no movie.”

Whatever his comments, Morris’s film speaks for itself: as a wake-up call to the facility of dehumanization and to the horrors of Bush administration policies. “This is a very dark period of U.S. history,” he said. “Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun.”

Abu Ghraib, he points out, “got turned around, so the soldiers ruined the war, undermining the war effort, so no one takes responsibility for Abu Ghraib. ” The soldiers’ participation in the banality of evil reflects that of Americans as a whole.