Los Angeles Journal


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2008-05-01

by John Esther

interview: Errol Morris

Summary

The Standard Operating Procedure of US

Article

Someone’s son in a makeshift scarecrow outfit stands on a box wired for pain. A happy white couple stand arm in arm behind a group of naked, darker-skinned men (sons, brothers, husbands, fathers) hunched and piled on a cold, concrete floor. An army grunt with a cigarette in her smirking mouth points at the genitalia of hooded men (sons, brothers, husbands, fathers).

These and other photos exposing the torture and sexual humiliation conducted by American servicemen and women at Abu Ghraib Prison were the final nails in the coffin that carried the last remnants of America’s self-delusions of innocence.

It was 2004 and now there was no longer denying the torture and other violations of the Geneva Convention the Bush administration had rejected. The jig was up. The world looked on the sights/sites with fright and fear. Innocence, hope, were lost, mysteries explained…

Treating the servicewomen and men like they were aberrations, although they received orders from above, the powers-that-beat went into spin control. They condemned the participants; especially the ones who dared to take photos that would “abet the enemy.”

Four years later and the government nor the American people have done much to address what it was we saw in those images. Yet one person who could not and would not let it dissolve is Errol Morris, the formidable director behind Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

Without a political agenda, per se, Morris interviews photographer Spc. Sabrina Harman and the other perpetrators in the prison – Sergeant Javal Davis, Sergeant Ken Davis, Sergeant Tony Diaz, CACI contract interrogator Tim Dugan, Spc. Jeffrey Frost, Spc. Megan Ambuhl Graner, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, Spc. Roman Krol, Special Agent Criminal Investigator Brent Pack, Spc. Jeremy Sivits and poster-prison girl Private First Class Lynndie England – while recreating the why, where and who went down.

As he rigorously unveils the timeline of events it becomes evident Morris is not interested in joining the lynch Lynndie and company chorus. Morris makes them very sympathetic; as much as one could I suppose.

Indeed Morris’ intentions are more analytical than political. Who took the photos and why? What is the greater crime: torture or embarrassing the military by exposing the torture? Is seeing believing? At what point can we make judgments about those thousand words expressed in a photo?

An Oscar-winner for his previous documentary, The Fog of War, in this exclusive interview we spoke to the 60-year-old Morris about his Standing Operating Procedure.

Los Angeles Journal: Why did you want to make this documentary? Primarily, what are your political intentions?
Errol Morris: I don’t think it’s a matter of political intentions. I suppose if I were being completely ingenuous I would say, “Of course I have political biases.” I have many political thoughts, but the impetus for making the movie was my annoyance with how many of these questions have devolved into political debate without any kind of investigation to determine what in hell is really going on. The photographs are a perfect example – photographs everybody has seen, photographs that very quickly became politicized, photographs where the left had a version of it, the right had a different version of it. It very quickly became an argument with nothing more than political content. What I have tried to do is to take it out of that arena to investigate, to actually talk to the soldiers to try to find out what actually was going on there.

LAJ: How did you gain their trust to get them to go on camera?
EM: By talking to them. By convincing them that I did really want to tell their story, that I was interested in hearing their story. Maybe I’m the first one who actually really wanted to listen to them? It’s the photographs that actually give me a different entry point. If you say, “Okay, I want to show that the administration was involved or I want to show that the administration wasn’t involved,” already the questions you’re asking already have a political overtone. If you’re asking a simple question, and I’d liked to think these are very simple questions that were just not asked by other people; if you’re asking a very simple question about what happened in the photographs, can we learn what actually went on in these photographs? I find it, of course, interesting that one of the government witnesses, Brent Pack, tells us that the most notorious photograph of the Iraq war – the picture of the hooded man on the box with wires – that it’s a picture of “standard operating procedure.” That’s not a political assessment; correct me if I’m wrong. It’s coming from someone who is charged with interpreting the photographs, of making sense of the photographs and telling us what we’re looking at.

LAJ: How did the experience of making this documentary change your perceptions of England and company?
EM: They’ve been described in the press as monsters. You tell me, what was your impression of them going in?

LAJ: I had a pretty negative viewpoint. I knew they weren’t the only ones doing this. Reports from alternative sources were saying these were not the only incidences. They just happened to be the ones who were caught.
EM: Or who took photographs…Sometimes we just fail to see the obvious. The obvious isn’t obvious. We look at a photograph and we don’t ask ourselves important questions about what we’re looking at. The picture of Sabrina smiling with the thumb up. We see the smile. We see the thumb. We don’t ask questions about the body in the picture – a man who was murdered by the CIA. We don’t ask ourselves anything about it. That I find really interesting. I also find it interesting that both left and right [considered] these people monsters, beyond the pale. The right will say they’re monsters of their own devising acting on their own [Laughs]. The left will say they were directed from above by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld [Laughs]. I found it to be very difficult, by the way, that they are people who look at the movie so convinced that these people are monsters they can’t even see them. They wear the lenses of both left and right in terms of how this whole thing was viewed.

LAJ: That goes to images we see. Even if we do ask these questions we still see what we want to see. We can hark this back to the Rodney King beatings.
EM: That’s a perfectly good example of people seeing different things in the same videotape.

LAJ: The sense I get is that you feel that these images will represent, in many ways, America and these times for many years to come.
EM: They’re iconic images. It’s not me that made them iconic. It’s the fact that they have become so well known. If you ask people about the images connected to this war it will be the Abu Ghraib photographs.

LAJ: But will we remember these images? Many people say America has a terrible problem remembering mistakes we’ve made in the past. How will we interpret these images 10-20 years from now?
EM: A lot of it has to do with how we come to terms with this war. We must come to terms with it in some way. I suppose, like Vietnam, it can just peter out and there will be a change in administration and, in that instance, one Republican president can do what the previous Republican president failed to do. Ford could end it whereas Nixon could not. There’s a terrible price we all pay by not actually dealing with what we’ve done and who we are. The photographs are a story about the denial of many things. Our desire not to really investigate and find out what the underlying truth might be, but out desire to be happy with various kinds of political posturing. I worry about this country in the sense of how horribly polarized it’s become. It now seems an endless argument about this policy and that policy. We need a clear idea of what happened there. Maybe it’s even worse than what we’ve imagined. In fact, I believe it is.

LAJ: I wanted to address two major criticisms of the documentary. The first one is that somehow by displaying these images once again you are somehow victimizing the victims once again.
EM: For one thing, it’s the same kind of confusion that was made about the pictures initially. People were punished not because they committed crime, but because they were in pictures or took pictures that embarrassed the military – a confusion that the pictures are the crime and not those things actually depicted in the pictures. It’s not the pictures that are the crime. It’s our need to confront what actually happened there which is an issue…If you have evidence of a crime scene should you cover it up forever?

LAJ: Exactly. We cannot show Nazi victims because that would victimize them again?
EM: It’s losing sight of what the real crime actually is. It’s getting confused. The photography is not the crime. If you have photographic evidence of any kind of crime should that photographic evidence be suppressed because it might embarrass people? Or is the greater interest in actually finding out what really happened and punishing the people that are responsible?

LAJ: The slightly tougher criticism is that you recreate some historical events and there’s that train of thought that by recreating horror or horrific incidences of the past is somehow disrespectful because it doesn’t really capture the true horror of what really happened. That for people to see these recreations gives them the impression that they have seen the horror when they really haven’t seen the horror.
EM: Think of this argument. People shouldn’t write history because history doesn’t really capture what is was really like. How effective and powerful do you think is that argument?…I’m not going to say I’m the final arbiter of truth in history. I’m not. But I believe that there’s a much bigger story to be told. You take people into the testimony offered by the MPs – Frost and Diaz who took the bodies down off of the wall – [and] you find out he was alone with the CIA interrogator, that he was killed, and that Sabrina actually went in after the fact when her commanding officers had all tried to cover up the fact of the murder.

LAJ: Lastly, what do you think about these interviews where you sit and discuss your work? Does it serve the work or should the work speak for itself?
EM: I don’t know really. How do I know? I’m doing them.

LAJ: What motivates you to do them?
EM: It’s a very complex movie. I have a book coming out. There’s an enormous amount of material that’s uncovered. It all can’t be represented in the movie. I’m not so sure people understand the movie. I worry. It’s a complicated issue. It’s photography. It’s the war in Iraq. It’s America. It deserves talking about.