http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/insight/06/01/0601morris.html
Seen, unseen For filmmaker Errol Morris, the Abu Ghraib photos concealed
as much as they revealed, and helped cover up the larger truth. By Jody
Seaborn
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Last summer, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris began writing
Zoom, a blog about photography for The New York Times.
In his blog, Morris examines how photographs,
of both the still and moving variety,
"attract false beliefs as fly-paper attracts flies."
We're often fooled by photographs, Morris has written,
"because photography can make us
think we know more than we really know."
The themes that Morris explores in Zoom
that it is necessary to understand what a photograph
doesn't show us to understand what it does
are at the heart of his latest film,
"Standard Operating Procedure," which opens Friday in Austin.
Like "The Thin Blue Line," Morris' superlative
1988 documentary that helped overturn the wrongful conviction
of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas police officer,
"Standard Operating Procedure" is an investigative work.
It seeks to determine whether the abuses of Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib were merely the work of a few "bad apples,"
as the military and the Bush administration publicly maintained,
or the result of policies sanctioned and encouraged
by civilian and military leaders.
For two years, Morris interviewed soldiers, interrogators
and investigators, and examined letters, depositions, memos,
and military and government reports to find the larger truth
behind the infamous photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib.
As he writes in his director's statement for the film,
"The story of Abu Ghraib
is still shrouded in moral ambiguity,
but it is clear what happened there."
And what happened, Morris says, is that the seven military police
soldiers convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib
Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, Sgt. Javal Davis,
Cpl. Charles Graner, Spc. Sabrina Harman,
Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Spc. Jeremy Sivits and Pfc. Lynndie England
were doing what they thought their superiors wanted done.
Their job was to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.
Morris doesn't exonerate these soldiers,
but he gives their actions context.
What do the Abu Ghraib photographs tell us?
What do they not tell us? Morris has said that they serve
as both exposé and cover-up. That is, the photographs
limited the very scandal they helped uncover.
While they offer a nightmarish look at something that had
gone seriously wrong inside Iraq, something deeply at odds
with our ideas of justice, they also misled us into thinking
that what we saw was all there was.
A few of the more disturbing photographs some of which
were staged for the camera appear to document
an abuse far worse than it physically was.
Their power, Morris says, comes not from what they detail
but from what they suggest. One such photo is the iconic image
of the Iraqi whom the soldiers nicknamed Gilligan,
who stands hooded on a cardboard box
with his arms outstretched under a makeshift poncho
while wires dangle from his fingers
(he was told that he would be electrocuted if he fell from the box).
Gilligan's ordeal with the wires lasted 10, maybe 15 minutes
and was relatively tame by Abu Ghraib standards.
He later became one of the soldiers' favorite prisoners after he,
like most Abu Ghraib detainees, was cleared
of any involvement in insurgent attacks.
"He was just a funny, funny guy,"
Harman told Morris.
Other photographs, meanwhile, distract from a deeper,
more serious crime. The same night the Gilligan pictures
were taken, Harman and Graner photographed themselves
smiling, thumbs up next to the bruised body
of Manadel al-Jamadi, a suspected insurgent
whose death during a CIA interrogation session
would later be classified a homicide by military investigators.
Harman's commanding officer had told her that al-Jamadi
had died of a heart attack, and she took a later set of photos
to document the lie. But the photographs of Graner and Harman,
especially the picture of Harman, are better known, and they
almost force al-Jamadi, and thus the circumstances of his death,
from the scene.
In investigating Abu Ghraib, Morris collected more material
than one movie can possibly hold. An excellent companion book,
also titled "Standard Operating Procedure" and written
by New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch, uses the information
that Morris gathered to further explore the story of Abu Ghraib.
"There was no excuse" for Abu Ghraib, Gourevitch writes,
"and there was nothing to show for it either,
no great score of useful intelligence,
no ends to justify the means.
Nobody has ever even bothered to pretend otherwise.
The horror ... was entirely gratuitous."
I spoke recently with Morris about his film
and the Abu Ghraib photographs.
A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows.
Austin American-Statesman:
You're intrigued by how photos without context
paint a false picture of events.
'Do they provide evidence,' you've written,
'and if so, evidence of what?'
Looking at the Abu Ghraib photos,
how would you answer these questions?
Errol Morris:
I often think about photographs as revealing and concealing
at the same time. Of course, without these photographs,
we would know nothing about Abu Ghraib. It's like someone pulled
back a stage curtain and gave us a glimpse into this bizarre reality.
But did we know what we were looking at?
Did we take a further step and try to investigate and figure out
whether what we imagined about the photographs,
what we believed about the photographs,
what we thought about the photographs,
was actually what the photographs were about?
Some of the pictures document an abuse under way
photos of detainees who are handcuffed to their bunks
or their cell bars with panties on their heads, for example
but the more famous photographs the hooded Iraqi
on a box, the Iraqi on a leash are posed.
Does that make them worse? Why do these photos
resonate more deeply with us than the more 'vérité' ones?
I even divide the photographs into three categories: one, vérité,
people just taking pictures. Then, they put Americans in the picture
servicemen maybe smiling, thumbs up, whatever,
with an Iraqi prisoner in the frame. And then, of course,
the third category, which is what you're talking about,
is photographs that seem to be tableaux-evolved.
Someone constructed a scene so that a picture could be taken.
And I think we feel it in the picture.
I think that's what makes the picture so deeply disturbing. ...
One of the surprising things about mucking around with this story
for two years is having Brent Pack (a military forensic investigator
whose job was to analyze the Abu Ghraib photographs)
tell me that the picture of Gilligan
is S.O.P.: standard operating procedure.
The photo of Abu Ghraib.
The photo of Abu Ghraib: standard operating procedure.
Of course, then the question is, what is the line of demarcation?
You're talking about a war where humiliation, degradation
sexual humiliation and degradation is part of it.
It's such a crazy story, people stripping you know,
I can tell you one thing I never do in interviews
is I never try to strip people. I never put sacks on their heads.
I just try talking to them. I find this to be a very effective method
for finding things out. Where this crazy stuff came from, well,
... this wasn't invented by Graner and Frederick
and Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman.
This was part of the war effort.
It's the essence of the war effort.
Harman seems to have the idea that at some point
she's going to need her photos to report and that's a word
she uses in her letters home, 'report' these abuses.
Where did she think she might go with these photos?
I don't know. But if not for her photos,
we would not know about the death of al-Jamadi.
Now maybe she didn't turn the photos over to "60 Minutes II" and
The New Yorker (both of which broke the story of Abu Ghraib).
She imagined herself doing it.
She wanted to show that the military, in her words to Kelly,
in that letter right after the photographs of al-Jamadi,
that the military is nothing but lies.
You know, she went home on leave immediately after
(the al-Jamadi pictures were taken) and she tried to show
the photos to a CNN reporter that she met in a bar
and the CNN reporter wasn't interested.
She writes these letters to Kelly, a woman she describes
as her 'wife.' She's a lesbian in the military.
Does that fact affect the way Harman was treated?
I think it saved her. By the way, when American men use
American women to degrade Iraqi men, they're degrading
American women at the same time.
There's something so twisted and sick about it.
And Sabrina escaped this in part.
She, of course, was not part of that infamous love triangle
between Lynndie and Megan and Graner.
She was off to the side. So in part, yes, I think she was
removed from a certain kind of sexual tension. ...
One photograph I'm just writing an essay for Zoom on this;
it's about how Sabrina was implicated in al-Jamadi's death.
The picture of her smiling with her thumbs-up
over the corpse of al-Jamadi.
Of course, she had nothing to do with his death.
She wanted to be a forensic photographer.
And most of the pictures she took that night were forensic pictures.
You can't describe them any other way.
Detailed pictures of the injuries that al-Jamadi received.
She's actually capturing evidence.
It's an act of civil disobedience in the military
to show that she had been lied to by her commanding officer
who told her that this was a man who had died of a heart attack.
The guy who killed al-Jamadi, the CIA officer,
never gets prosecuted or reprimanded. There's a cover-up
where they take the body out on a gurney with an IV.
The people involved in the cover-up never get prosecuted.
Sabrina gets sent to jail for a year for taking a photograph.
The photo of al-Jamadi documents a homicide.
But when people look at that photo, they see Sabrina
leaning over the body, smiling, thumbs-up,
and that's what we focus on. She glues us to the frame.
All of Abu Ghraib disappears, Sabrina disappears, everything
disappears except for the smile. We've lost the context for everything.
And we've lost what lies outside the frame.
That's correct. We've also lost a little bit about what lies inside the
frame.
What lies inside the frame?
The body of someone that someone else has killed, not her.
But we don't know that.
We interpret the picture itself incorrectly.
And yes, at the same time, we do not see all of that
unrecorded world the before, the after, the top, the bottom,
all of those things that are not included in the picture at all.
But even in the picture, we are mistaken about what we are seeing.
We're mistaken about the emotions we think she's feeling.
We're mistaken about her relationship to the body
namely, our belief that she's monstrous because
of the smile and must have been implicated in this man's death.
Photographs can be an instrument of error.
I think they're wonderful. Where would I be without photography?
But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't think critically about images. ...
You look at the photographs 270 photographs put into evidence
and you think, oh, Abu Ghraib is a cell block with these MPs.
It's a massive prison, with close to 10,000 prisoners by the end
of 2003, horribly undersupplied, horribly understaffed.
Soldiers horribly untrained. Criminal Iraqi police
ex-members of the Fedayeen running around.
Food shortages. Rioting. Mortar attacks. You name it.
Bedlam.
I hope the movie gives you the feeling of, what in the hell
would I do if I found myself there. If I were in the Army in some
lowly boots-on-the-ground position where I had to see my way
ethically and morally through something that could only
be described as a nightmare, what in the hell would I do?
I hate hearing about various theories about the bad apples
because you can theorize endlessly about them.
I think that the important thing is first to look at them.
To say that Sabrina has no ethical concerns is just to ignore
what she's saying or to ignore her letters. All of these people
are wrestling with ethics in a place where their range of action
is severely circumscribed. It's not clear they can do anything.
They're in a war zone.
They're in the military.
They see their commanders doing stuff that's even worse.
The story of Abu Ghraib feels incomplete.
We have a few so-called bad apples who were punished,
but the officials responsible for the box where
these apples rotted remain unpunished.
It's an unsatisfying ending.
I don't know what the ending is yet.
The ending is yet to be written by America and by Americans.
I've been asked, I don't know how many times,
what about the smoking gun? Have you found the smoking gun?
What's the smoking gun supposed to be?
Well, I used to joke about it. I would say,
what do you think you're going to find?
Are you going to find the video conference call where
Donald Rumsfeld tells Chuck Graner:
"You ever think of piling them in a pyramid?"
I don't think that exists!
But I think there are hundreds of smoking guns that we've seen.
They're all around us. They're everywhere. How many torture memos
does an administration have to promulgate before you get the idea
that they're promulgating torture?
How much stuff do you need to see?
Every time that we somehow just leave things be and accept the fact
that lowly soldiers take the fall and the big shots run away
and never are confronted by what they've done,
I think we all lose, ultimately. It affects us all.
And not for the good.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
512 - 445 -1702
About Abu Ghraib
A notorious prison before the war, Abu Ghraib was officially
a forward operating base for the U.S. military. It was in the heart
of the growing Sunni insurgency and was under frequent mortar attack.
Most of the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib thousands of them
were housed in tents behind concertina wire on the prison grounds.
Several prisoners were killed by the ongoing mortar attacks.
It is a violation of U.S. military doctrine and the
Geneva Conventions to hold prisoners in a combat zone.
The members of the 372nd Military Police Company
who were punished for abuses at Abu Ghraib arrived
at the prison in early October 2003. They were combat MPs
meant to support front-line forces and had no training running a prison.
Their predecessors introduced members of the 372nd
to some of the methods used to facilitate interrogations
including sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation.
As Lynndie England says in 'Standard Operating Procedure,' '
The example was already set' by the time the 372nd arrived at Abu Ghraib.
The photographed abuses mostly took place on one cell block,
Tier 1A, one of Abu Ghraib's 'hard sites.'
It was there that 'high-value' prisoners were held
under the authority of military intelligence officers.
The American presence at Abu Ghraib included not only
military personnel but also interrogators from the CIA
and other government agencies, as well as civilian contractors.
There were no formal, clear procedures in place defining
the proper treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib. '
They couldn't say we broke the rules because there were no rules,'
Megan Ambuhl says in 'Standard Operating Procedure.'
Additional information
Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch wrote about Abu Ghraib
in the March 24 issue of The New Yorker. Their article, titled
'Exposure,' is available online at NewYorker.com.
Zoom, Morris' blog for The New York Times
(morris.blogs.nytimes.com; also errolmorris
.com) explores photography's need for context.
His most recent essay examines the Abu Ghraib photo
of Sabrina Harman next to the body of Manadel al-Jamadi.
Salon.com maintains an archive of 2
79 photographs and 19 videos from Abu Ghraib.
A series of short articles explains the photos.
The site also provides links to Pentagon
and independent investigations into Abu Ghraib.
Another documentary,
'Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,'
a 2007 film directed by Rory Kennedy,
is available on DVD.
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/insight/06/01/0601insight_abu_ghraib.html
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ILLUSTRATION FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO
The power of some of the Abu Ghraib photographs, such as
the image of a hooded Iraqi prisoner, comes from their ambiguity,
filmmaker Errol Morris says.
They are disturbing, not for what they show us,
but for what we imagine they show.
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