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[HollywoodInvestigator.com]
I am sitting two feet away from Oscar-winning documentarian Errol
Morris. He is screaming at me. And I couldn't be more pleased.
Morris's latest documentary
feature, Standard
Operating Procedure [theatrical release by Sony Pictures and
Participant Media in Los Angeles on May 2; also a
book], is not just about Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and its administration
by the U.S. military.
With the same trademark élan
evident in The
Fog of War, his Academy Award-winning doc on former Secretary of Defense
Robert McNamara, Morris's SOP,
which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival,
weaves together an overwhelming number of topical strands with remarkable
clarity and artistry.
But it is the sentencing
of seven soldiers -- MPs at Abu
Ghraib -- and the refusal of the military, US government and population
at large to look beyond this “framing” of the pictures of humiliated and
tortured Iraqi detainees, that is the reason Morris, generally the most
genial and polite of interview subjects, vented his frustration after a
question of mine.
Specialist Sabrina Harman,
as guard on the night shift for the 372nd MP Company, explains in SOP that she took photos not only of naked Iraqi prisoners but the dead body
of a detainee named Manadel al-Jamadi, who was murdered after an interrogation
by a CIA officer, whose name is known to the military. She insists
the
photos were not for perverse pleasure but because she felt compelled to
document the repugnant activities in Abu
Ghraib.
"Why wasn't the CIA officer
ever charged?" Morris shouted to me with uncustomary vehemence. "Why was
the only person ever threatened with imprisonment over the death of Al-Jamadi,
why was it Sabrina, for taking a goddamn photograph that exposes the military,
exposes a crime? To me it's a metaphor for the whole goddamn war
in Iraq."
Among the interviewees, Morris
surprisingly managed to capture on film six of the seven "bad apples" of
the 372nd MP, excluding Cpl. Charles Graner, responsible for arranging
such disturbing, indelible images as an Iraqi with a hood standing on a
box, with wires hanging off him or a pyramid of naked detainees. Graner received ten years, as the stiffest sentence of those charged, but SOP,
upon careful scrutiny, points to culpability at higher levels.
For example, Brigadier General
Janis Karpinski, 800th MP Brigade, was eventually relieved of command and
demoted
by President George W. Bush. Morris selected clips of his 17 hours
of interviews with Karpinski to reveal that Karpinski was responsible for
rebuilding and running the entire, decimated prison system in Iraq. When she inspected Abu
Ghraib, interrogation techniques used there were shielded from her
view.
Karpinski could not identify
the staggering mix of civilian contract interrogators, CIA officers and,
in
military lexicon, OGA (other governmental agencies) going in and
out of cells at the prison. Most damning of all, when Karpinski became
aware of the systematic mistreatment of Abu
Ghraib detainees, she informed Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who promptly
ordered her to do nothing. She became the highest-ranking scapegoat
in relation to the Abu Ghraib scandal and her onscreen gaze is suffused
with cold resentment.
Morris's collaborator on
the book
version of SOP,
author and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, has stated that rather
than wondering about finding a "smoking gun," irrefutable evidence of the
definitive culprit of Abu Ghraib, that "Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun." Morris opens his documentary by contextualizing the prison, which was emptied
of all its prisoners in the Fall of 2002 by Saddam
Hussein. Under US occupation, Abu
Ghraib became the center of military intelligence, despite its legacy
for torture and murder of prisoners under Saddam.
Conditions in the prison
breached the Geneva
Conventions. Military sweeps brought in detainees, often relatives
of suspects, without any confirming intelligence. A prison population
of 200 grew to an unmanageable 1500. Food was scarce and often contaminated. And in one of the most obvious abrogations of Geneva, Abu
Ghraib was located in a war zone, within the bloody "Sunni Triangle,"
where
daily shelling of the prison made the psychological conditions inside even
more volatile.
Photos were widely distributed
electronically among the soldiers at Abu
Ghraib, beginning in October of 2003, which included images taken by
Cpl.
Graner of PFC Lynddie England and Specialist Megan Ambuhl, two women who
posed with a naked, leashed prisoner called "Gus." In a stunning
parenthetical in this documentary, Morris delves into the fact that Graner
was simultaneously having sexual relations with both England and Ambuhl,
the latter now his wife.
Lieutenant General Sanchez
is not the only officer who escaped justice for a coverup. It was
January 13, 2004, when Specialist Joseph Darby turned a CD of Abu Ghraib
photos into the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. The result,
as we learn in Morris's work is this: Three days later, Colonel Thomas
Pappas issued an amnesty for all military personnel who possessed the Abu
Ghraib photos. In essence, this enabled the wholesale destruction of
all evidence connected to the scandal.
Ironically, Spec. Harman
had earlier attempted to disseminate the photos within the US media and
with considerably lesser results. "You know, Sabrina burned a CD,"
Morris explained. "Shortly after the death of al-Jamadi, she was sent back
to the US on a leave. She tried to show the photographs to someone
at CNN who didn't really want to look at them."
The evening I returned from
the press roundtable with Morris, the news on television put SOP into clearer perspective. The Associated Press revealed that a group
within the White House, including Vice President Dick
Cheney, with the approval of Bush, labored to find legal justification
for
waterboarding and other interrogation techniques they knew to be objectionable
and unacceptable under international law. Between 2002 and 2003,
the Justice Department had issued several memos from its Office of Legal
Counsel.
As I heard the news, I recalled
Morris's furious rhetorical question from just hours before: "How many
torture memos does a government have to promulgate before you get the idea
they
might be interested in promulgating torture? How many? What
would satisfy anybody?"
Morris mentioned that there
have been 13 separate investigations on Abu
Ghraib, what he refers to as "almost an investigative filibuster." His reframing of the significance of those prison photos, those who took
them and those who controlled how they were perceived, is a distillation
of a million and a half words of interview transcript, along with thousands
of pages of unredacted reports and about 270 photographs that shook the
world but has left it materially unchanged.
"The photographs have stopped
us from looking further and demanding answers," Morris said, "almost as
if we've gone into this state of shock and nothing more is needed. It's
a democracy still and I still have some residual faith in that democracy. And I believe that part of moving past the stain of Abu
Ghraib is confronting what actually happened there. Not scapegoats
but confronting what happened there."
He was featured in a Hollywood Investigator article about his participation
in the play, What I Heard About Iraq.
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