This Is England | Errol Morris scored a revealing interview with disgraced U.S. soldier Lynndie England for Standard Operating Procedure
Directed by Errol Morris. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel), Sept. 5-11.
*** 1/2
Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure posits a question that must have crossed many people’s minds when they first saw the horrifying images of detainee abuse that emerged during the Abu Ghraib scandal. That question would be: why in God’s name would U.S. soldiers take so many pictures of the degradation and harm they inflicted on countless Iraqi detainees? The answer, according to Morris: they didn’t think they were doing anything wrong.
Morris doesn’t reprise former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s explanation of why the media was suddenly showing so many pictures of Iraqis stripped naked, stacked in piles, cowering from vicious dogs, and forced to masturbate with underwear over their heads. But his soundbite about “a few bad apples” was heard around the world, and that’s the way the White House and the military played it. They prosecuted the soldiers who had immortalized themselves with idiotic grins and thumbs-up signs alongside the people they were sexually, physically, and psychologically tormenting and said the problem had been dealt with, even though the tactics
employed against “enemy combatants” at Abu Ghraib had also been in wide use in Guantánamo Bay and Bagram (cf. Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side).
Standard Operating Procedure uses the incriminating photographs and Morris’s own SOP of letting his subjects tell the story in their own words straight into the camera to get at some of the reasons Abu Ghraib happened, and to suggest that the photos and the people who took them have been a smokescreen for what happened to detainees after they had been softened up for interrogation.
Morris’ interviewees are almost exclusively soldiers who were uniformly young and inexperienced in combat when they were marched into the prison where Saddam Hussein is thought to have killed 30,000 of his citizens and where they had to cohabit with a few thousand Iraqi detainees while insurgents shelled them from outside. That doesn’t excuse anything they did, but it may help to explain why some of them got carried away messing with their prisoners on the way to interrogation, especially when they’d been told to push the envelope of acceptable treatment and to, above all, dig some “intelligence” out of the truckloads of terrified Iraqi men who were dragged through the door.
As ever, Morris alternates his full-frame interviews with hallucinatory snippets of dramatization — set to Danny Elfman’s Philip Glass-esque score — that capture the texture of dread and belie the attempts by some of the interviewees to make what they did sound innocuous. The soldiers maintain that, bad as the photographs look, they never deliberately injured and certainly never killed anyone, unlike the military interrogators who eventually took control of the prisoners. And as you listen to them talk, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that none of them were acting independently when they committed the acts that got them court-martialed and thrown in jail — most of them just don’t seem bright enough to be that calculating or cruel.
For people worn down by the ongoing fact of a pointless, destructive war in Iraq, revisiting one of its most demoralizing low points in sometimes tedious detail will be all the more wearying. Ultimately, though, Standard Operating Procedure is invaluable for delineating the banal elements that contributed to the nightmare at Abu Ghraib, and for giving a voice to the hapless, if not quite blameless, schmucks who had their lives and careers shattered for following orders.
