ERROL
   MORRIS

With STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, Errol Morris pondered a simple question: Why were the soldiers at Abu Ghraib punished for taking photographs rather than the humiliation they enforced?

In the four years since the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was exposed, Morris has been on a crusade not to politicize the event, as it became scrutinized in the eyes of the world. It was a crippling PR blow to America and fueled the ongoing war between right wing versus left wing.

Morris, an Academy Award winner for THE FOG OF WAR, simply uses the camera to tell the story of the seven soldiers who were in the iconic photos, as well as witnesses inside the prison to get an understanding of just what went on that led to these images that scarred the world's perception of America.

To promote his latest film, Morris took time out for a rare interview with press reporters, to which the Crypt was graciously invited to. The following are highlights from the one hour conversation about the film, the current administration, and what he hopes people learn from the events of STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE.

Have you met with any resistance from the government yet on this film being that they seem to want to squash anything related to anything negative about the Iraq War?

ERROL MORRIS: Resistance from the government? Not so far but the movie really is not in release yet. There was always the question of documents, even more so than the interviews because I’ve assembled tens of thousands of pages of documents over the course of the last couple of years and the rules of course have been in flux during this administration. I don’t know, I mean I have just started this. The movie is part of it. There is a book written by Phillip Maravich and myself coming out in May. There is a website that I plan to put a lot of this material online so that it’s available to the public at large. When Phillip and I started working together, he saw the transcripts from the interviews that I had done up to that point and it represented over three and half million words so there is a lot of material, the movie is one small part of it.

What will the book contain?

EM: It’s going to contain interview material from many of the interviews that are in the film plus stuff that isn’t in the film at all. I interviewed probably twice the number of people that I used in the movie so there’s a lot of stuff.

How did you decide which subjects you used in the movie to those you didn’t?

EM: Because I kept going back to the photographs. If the center of the story is the photographs, it was important to feature those people who were directly involved in taking them, it’s simple as that.

In the film, the photographs aren’t redacted and are shown unedited. Why did you decide to keep the photographs untouched in the film?

EM: A variety of different ways. One of the things so fascinating about this story is the fact that people were blamed for taking pictures, not so much for what is depicted in the pictures. That in itself is endlessly interesting. People were blamed for embarrassing America, for embarrassing the administration and embarrassing the military, but it loses sight of one fundamental thing. The crime here is not photography. The war isn’t shown in photographs. The crime here is what is depicted in the photographs and as such the photographs represent very significant and important evidence not to be hidden, suppressed, or redacted. They represent really important evidence that should be shown and discussed.

Why wasn’t Joseph Darby interviewed for the film, being he was the person most responsible for the public knowing about this scandal?

EM: I did interview him. He’s one of the people who I did in fact interview at length. I believe I have a six or seven hour interview with Joseph Darby. I chose not to use the interview for a whole number of reasons. I find Darby an endlessly interesting character but he is really not part of the story that I wanted to tell. First of all, most of those photographs were widely known before Darby brought them in to CID. I also think CID is implicated in a lot of ways of what happened at Abu Ghraib. To me this story is these people who took the photographs and why. I’ll give you just one small example among many examples. It’s been written about, not extensively, but it’s certainly been written about and it’s been investigated. The ghost detainee, Al-Jamadi, had been brought in to Abu Ghraib very early in on the morning of November 4th. He walked in alive, he left as a corpse strapped to a gurney with an IV and made to look as though in fact that he was still alive. Sabrina Harman took a set of pictures of the corpse, one which contained an infamous photograph, the picture of her in front of Al-Jamadi’s corpse with a broad smile on her face and her thumb up. It’s in my movie. What’s really fascinating to me is that she wasn’t involved with the murder. She was suspicious of what she had been told. She had got into the shower room where Al-Jamadi had been killed and took these pictures. She wrote a letter to her girlfriend Kelly saying that the military was nothing but lies and she had been told a lie in connection with this prisoner’s death and she wanted to prove otherwise. Regardless of what you think of Sabrina, there’s a more complex story here that’s never been told. It’s not a story about seven bad apples that got caught because they were so stupid. It’s a different kind of story and I like to think that I am trying to tell it in a way that’s never been told before.

Could you talk about your visceral reaction to these pictures the first time you saw them and how those impulses transpired into you making this film?

EM: I don’t think that this experience is in anyway unique to me. I found the photographs as utterly bizarre, something insane about them. I read Susan Suntag’s article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine regarding the torture of others. She had mentioned that what was so disturbing about the photographs is that in many instances they seemed posed. People were posing in them or they had posed prisoners in the photographs. I agree, I think that is probably the most disturbing aspects of the pictures. The pictures are unique in that they are different than war photographs. They are not taken by war journalists or photographers or by people who are assigned the task of covering the war. They are taken by the soldiers themselves. Of course because they are taken by soldiers themselves in evidently the question became are these pictures of policy or are these pictures of abhorrent behavior on the part of as the phrase became known “a few bad apples.” It’s an endlessly interesting story. It’s one of the central stories of our time I think. I remain as fascinated now as I was when I first heard about it. A feeling of shame really, this idea which I think is more or less inescapable that what happened there has something to say about us and this country regardless of politics and that’s something that is a question. I don’t think it’s something that I can provide a set of easy answers. It’s one thing to play political football with the photographs. The left will say it’s Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. The right will say it’s a few bad apples acting on their own and it has nothing to do with our administration and policy and they disgraced our country.

Aside from the political debate, there’s the question of what the hell was going on there. Why not talk to the people who were actually there? I mean if this is so much a concern, it really amazes me that people will say “How come you didn’t interview Cheney? How come you didn’t interview Rumsfeld? Why do I have to listen to fucking privates and specialists talk about this?” Well there’s a very simple answer. You have to listen to them because they are right there at the center of it all. Is it policy? Is it the criminal behavior of a few people? You have the chief investigator for CID, for the Army, the guy who appears again and again at court martials to offer the photographs into evidence to say “These are the photographs, I can authenticate them et cetera” telling me that the iconic photograph of the Iraq War is Standard Operating Procedure? I mean think about it. Good God. They’re policy. In my own two cents worth of opinion and I really shouldn’t interpret my movie, I should just make it and shut the fuck up, but I’ve seen this war for a while and in the course of making this movie, I see it as a war of humiliation. I think for a number of years the entire foreign policy of the United States was “Kill Saddam.” That was our foreign policy, seriously. “Prove to Saddam who’s boss, shock and awe, the terminology.” The sexual humiliation which is so much part of the war, I ask myself “Ok, it’s fine when you put someone in a stretched position and you put women’s underwear on their head and you have a female strip them naked, but that’s not sexual abuse, this other stuff is.” It becomes this strange, whacked out world, it’s bedlam. Maybe the administration didn’t order up these things at some luncheonette menu and I don’t think they did. What they did was they created a setting in so many ways where things could devolve into this insanity whether it’s this relaxation, definitions of what is regarded as torture, conventions, treatees, international agreements, whether it’s sending an army that’s ill equipped or understaffed to an area where bad things will happen. There’s not one thing that tells you things will turn out badly, it’s a myriad of things that produces a disaster.

When you were preparing to make the film, you had the photographs?

EM: I had some of the photographs. I like to of think of myself as an investigative vacuum cleaner. I’m “Hoovering” this stuff up as I go along. I’ve accumulated now well over two thousand photographs. I’ll interview someone I’ll ask them “Do you have any photographs? Can I have all of them?”

At what point during this process do you decide which of these photographs you are going to investigate further by creating re-enactments based upon them?

EM: It happens as you go along and you struggle with the material. In a certain way, I did something very simple and crude. I tried to put them in chronological order. It’s always ill advised because chronology never follows or dictates the drama. I took the photographs which were the most infamous, the most well known, such as Gus on the leash and Lynndie holding the leash, the cropped out version. All of the pyramid, the night of the pyramid where things seemed to go nuts which was a surreal story within the story, the Al Jamadi photographs because this was an actual murder that occurred that had nothing to do whatsoever to do with these soldiers, the bad apples. If they were responsible for anything, they were responsible for uncovering it. The shooting incident, I thought it was interesting that these photographs I remember when I first saw them, all the blood smeared on the walls and the floor I thought to myself “What the hell happened here,” and then learning the details of that story. The place is crazy. You put a prison in the middle of the Sunni triangle. One of the standards of Geneva is you do not put prisoners in a war zone where they can be killed. You put them behind the lines. Abu Ghraib aside from all of its significance in Saddam’s regime was in a place that was just dangerous. It gets mortared. There are two military intelligence officers who lost their lives because of a mortar attack. Prisoners were killed. It was a dangerous place, ill supplied, understaffed, people pouring in from random sweeps unable to get out because of endless bureaucratic nonsense. The term has its own associations but we were running for all intents and purposes a concentration camp in the middle of a Sunni triangle, understaffed, ill equipped with untrained personnel. Congratulations!

Do you think there’s any possibility that in the future that Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush will sit in a chair like you did with McNamara did in THE FOG OF WAR and talk candidly about this war?

EM: I don’t know. Someone asked me recently about it, I’d be happy to interview Rumsfeld anytime. I’d do it tomorrow happily. I would cancel this press interview in a heartbeat.

How did you contrast the series of self knowledge of these soldiers to McNamara?

EM: Of course there’s an enormous difference. Another thing that drives me crazy is that people will truck out these psychology experiments and tell that all of this happened for this reason, blah blah blah. First of all, it’s the military guys, of course they follow orders. They’re privates, corporals, and sargeants! What do you think happens in the military? Someone discovered that in the military people followed orders? Phillip and I have been talking about writing an essay for the New York Times on the whole concept of following orders and what it means in the post World War II period. It’s obviously not an excuse for everything and anything but it is how armies operate.

We do have people that don’t follow orders. Not everybody all the time does follow orders. You’re right about Standard Operating Procedure but by removing Darby from the film, does it noble Sabrina?

EM: Take my good word for it, nobody knows the real story. Everybody loves to imagine what these stories are. You see something really, really, really, really bad and Abu Ghraib is what I call as something really, really, really bad. The natural human tendency is to imagine that these people are beyond the pail. They’re not like you and me, they’re in some deep sense sub human. On the flip side, they’re real heroes, they’re these people who stood up and said I won’t allow this to happen. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t people beyond the pail and they aren’t real heroes. I just think that this story is far, far more complex. The bad apples for both the left and right, it doesn’t matter, there’s this odd construction. Everyone has this investment of seeing them as bad. If you’re on the left, they see them as bad because we have a bad government. If you’re on the right, they’re bad because they decided to be bad on their own. The common ground here is bad bad, bad bad bad bad bad! Part of what the movie is trying to do and I think it’s a terrible, risky thing to do because people don’t want to see that these are people struggling with a kind of nightmare. I don’t like the idea for many, many reasons and I cannot go into all of the details. I don’t like the idea of “Here were the bad guys” and “here’s the good guy.” I don’t see it that way. I have this theory that Bush won the 2004 election for two reasons. One was that the Democratic candidate was no good. The other thing that was enormously helpful was that he had the bad apples.

“You want to know why the war went south? Look at these guys!”

“The Arab world hates us? These guys!”

“Insurgency growing? These guys!”

“War is going very badly, they all hate us! These guys!”

In doing these interviews, did you ever get a hold of any of the prisoners and did they get any intelligence out of the interrogations?

EM: Well that depends on who you talk to. If you talk to Janis Karpinski, the answer’s no. I’m sure that they got some intel out of the place but the irony is the main reason for its existence was to find Saddam and there was no intel from Abu Ghraib that led to his capture.

And the prisoners themselves, were you able to get them?

EM: Again, it’s about the people who took these photographs and their reasons. I’m not making a survey about Abu Ghraib. There were certain prisoner stories that did interest me. I didn’t want to talk to prisoners at random. I wanted to talk to prisoners who were in the iconic photographs. I wanted to talk to “Gus” and I wanted to talk to “Gilligan.” Those were the two people that I really wanted to talk to and I couldn’t find them. It’s not that I didn’t try. I tried really hard to find both of them and could not. Then of course there was the irony that the New York Times put on Page A1, the picture of “Clawman” holding the hooded man photograph saying that he was the guy under the hood. I wrote an essay for the times saying “Will the real hooded man please stand up?” I knew at the time when the photograph came up that he was not the guy. It’s interesting of all the essays I’d like to write at the moment, I’d like to write about what people take as convincing evidence and why people were convinced that “Clawman” was under the hood when it was in fact “Gilligan.” I asked Sabrina who took the photographs of “Gilligan” when she was there and “Clawman” was her prisoner and I asked her how could I be convinced that it was really “Gilligan” and not “Clawman” and she told me that “Clawman” weighed 280 pounds while “Clawman” weighed 120 pounds so if “Clawman” was standing on the box, he would’ve crushed it.

The re-enactment scenes really looks like you went to Abu Ghraib and filmed there.

EM: How you could say that is just crazy. Here was my thinking what I was doing. I was trying to tell a story about photographs and how do you tell a story about photographs? You show the photographs and you put white borders on them to show that they haven’t been adulterated. That’s how I think they’re read, I could be wrong but that was my intention. I then have retrospective accounts, they’re re-enactments from people speaking two, three years after the fact about why they took a photograph or what happened in the photograph whether it’s Sabrina or Jamal or Megan. They’re all retrospective, re-enacted verbal accounts and I hear what the people say to me. Inevitably, there are lines that suggest images that allow me to bring their retrospective accounts alive. It could be someone throwing a Nerf football. It could be someone talking about how they forced these three prisoners to low crawl so the prisoners themselves could watch. The images are there to bring you usually in ultra slow motion into that moment of photography, that moment when the photograph was taken. They are re-enactments in the sense of trying to imagine or re-imagine what might of taken place. It’s not because you are reconstructing reality perfectly, you could never do that but you want the audience to join you in thinking what transpired.

You like to talk about how these post-modernist say they’re past the truth?

EM: It makes me sick.

At what point as a filmmaker do you feel that exposing the truth is not enough?

EM: I like to think that some of the things that I’ve uncovered are relevant to the war. I imagine that this is a war of humiliation and that the idea was to show Iraq and Saddam Hussein who was boss. I think it’s taken various kinds of expressions. It was maybe half a year ago I was at the MPAA in Los Angeles arguing for an R rating for the movie while telling the same people I did not want to redact the photographs. I didn’t like the idea of blurring them out. I wanted the photographs to appear as they were. It seemed to spoil the whole underlying idea that these are the real photographs if I start fuzzing out this area or that area. I just didn’t want to do it. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too so to speak. I started to tell the head of the MPAA my feelings about this war and humiliation and he said “It’s really funny because the horror movies that have been coming in since the war started are about humiliation.” Now you don’t kill people, you humiliate them. The killing is kind of the afterthought. I think there is some truth to it. I haven’t written about it but it keeps coming back to me. It’s this strange Hall Of Mirrors. I believe that Abu Ghraib teaches us something about ourselves. It is a State of the Union address in its most perverse form. It tells us more than what we want to hear or what we want to know. The photographs became iconic for reasons that had nothing to do with me. They seem to express something and it’s not even clear what they express. Having years thinking about them, I can’t even understand them fully. They are these weird things created for the cameras because they captured something about the zeitgeist, something unpleasant and something disturbing. I think there is something to be said from this story, there is so much to learn from it. The critics haven’t weighed in on this movie but I see stuff here and there and I noticed that there’s this idea that I’ve done something which really is not the central issue. The central issue should be attacking Bush or attacking Cheney, that this represents the administration.

What is your responsibility to the audience?

EM: I think that we have a responsibility to think about this stuff. Why this country is so apathetic about the war, I can’t answer why. I have my theories about it. It’s devolved into a battle of the blogs. The left could take their position, the right could take their position, and people could get tired really listening to it because it’s representing the same thing being said again and again in the same way again and again. I truly believe that before you decide what something is you have to investigate it. The photographs were something that I saw horrified me and made me ashamed but I did not know how they were produced and what they were about. Let’s say you want to get into one of these left-right debates, the bad apples versus systemic policy. I can tell you I could think it’s systemic policy but if you don’t find it powerful and the audience doesn’t find it powerful, I could literally take a 2x4 and swing it repeatedly to the sides of your heads. If the head investigator takes these central, iconic photographs of abuse and says that it’s standard operating procedure, what does that mean? I mean to hell with the memo. I’m friends with Mark Danard and I remember Mark spoke at Harvard. Four people showed up for the talk. He’s a person who’s written extensively on torture and is trying to understand the war and the memos. All that’s important work, I’m not arguing otherwise. It’s just that it’s not the only story. I think the important story is with people here. These people were the scapegoats. Who are these people and how did they become for all of us this metaphor for the war? What is our role in all of this?

You’ve talked to the people who made these photographs so we are as audiences seeing documentaries coming out of Iraq that’s shot by soldiers. What do you think of this process?

EM: I think it’s an incredible process because so much more information is becoming available to us. It’s not necessarily good information but it doesn’t have to be. The US Government and the military would’ve loved to have suppressed all of these photographs and these photographs rendered an enormous public service. In an ironic service, they opened a curtain and gave us a glimpse into Abu Ghraib but we stopped as if somehow the photographs shouldn’t lead us deeper into the place and what it was about.

Thank you Errol.

EM: Thank you everyone.

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE opens in theaters on April 25th from Sony Pictures Classics

(Special thanks to Jessica Uzzan and Jeff Hill at International House Of Publicity)