January 15, 2009: Standard Operating Procedure
Standard Operating Procedure is a documentary about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses by the US Army in Iraq. This story was very big a few years ago, with some embarrassing photos widely circulating on the Internet, and it kicked off the big discussions about whether the US was using torture for interrogation purposes.
The film was directed by Errol Morris, who had previously won a Best Documentary Feature Oscar about 5 years ago for The Fog of War, which took the form of a lengthy in-depth interview with former US Defense Secretary (under JFK) Robert McNamara. It showed the human side of the decisions behind widely publicized world events, and that’s exactly what is done here again in Standard Operating Procedure. Morris is also well known for The Thin Blue Line (1988), a documentary about a man wrongly convicted of murder, which resulted in reopening of the case as well as unusually strong box office performance for a documentary. Both of these other works are well worth viewing.
Standard Operating Procedure contains extensive interview footage with almost all of the people directly involved with the scandal, including Lynndie England. This in itself is a near-miracle, considering how the US military tends to hide such embarrassments. Events are chronicled, backed up by re-enactments of certain events to smooth the story, and intercut with the actual uncensored versions of the photos with which the public is familiar. The end effect is to create confusion about who was responsible for things going wrong overall, despite the proper military precision around any single procedural point. We are left at the end with a pretty good sense of where things went wrong, but certainly convinced that it could never happen again.
This documentary was gripping, informative and well worth watching as long as the graphic pictures/video and subject matter don’t make this a total non-starter for the potential viewer. The final kick (and reference to the title) comes at the end of the film, when the interviewed forensic expert (who has pieced together events based on timestamps from the digital cameras used to take the photos) goes through several of the pictures, which depict the progression of what appears to be various torture techniques, and classifies each as being either torture or “Standard Operating Procedure”. The line is a fine one, and the justifications, while technically accurate, belie the overall intent of the “procedures”. It’s a tricky world we live in, and it’s not comfortable when we’re forced to take a look at the things that happen behind closed doors all the time.
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