Beyond the frame: Filmmaker Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib

Of all the guards implicated in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Lynndie England stands alone. Her smiling thumbs up beside a line of hooded prisoners is hard to forget. But in one photo, the one where she holds a nude prisoner on a leash, she wasn’t originally standing alone. She tells Errol Morris in his new film, Standard Operating Procedure that another soldier, Spec. Megan Ambuhl, stood two steps to her left in the original, but was cropped out, leaving the impression that England acted alone.

This idea of omission — and of what appears outside the photographic frame — is at the center of Morris’ "nonfiction horror film," which opens this Friday, May 23 at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis. While Standard Operationg Procedure takes its direct inspiration from the 270 Abu Ghraib images released by the Army, Morris (Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) focuses on what can’t be seen — critical context for understanding them. In a recent interview he told me, "Photographs can make us feel like we’ve seen everything when in fact we’ve hardly seen anything at all." In the following conversation, he discusses everything from the commanding officers who refused to appear in his film to the covert forensic photography of Specialist Sabrina Harman, and his belief that Abu Ghraib itself is "one big massive obscene violation" of the Geneva Conventions.

Listen: Errol Morris on "Standard Operating Procedure," 15:49

One of my themes in my work from the very, very beginning is that believing is seeing — that people see what they already believe. This may be the flip side, where we see something, we think we understand what we’re looking at and in fact we’re missing crucial pieces of information. When you talk about the statue of Saddam at the beginning of the war falling, that’s a different kind of deal. That’s just out and out fraud. That’s manufacturing news for public consumption. That’s trying to trick us, deliberately, into believing something that isn’t true. You need to investigate stuff. We live at a time when newspapers are dying on the vine. That doesn’t worry me so much as the possible death of journalism. Whether things are online or they are printed page is far less important than if people are actually digging for information, they’re looking at thing, they’re researching they’re thinking. I think it’s pretty goddamn crazy if I’m the person who has to start digging in this kind of material."

"Everything at Abu Ghraib is a violation of [the] Geneva [Conventions]. Kidnapping children in order to get their parents to talk, imprisoning children under 10 years of age, situating Abu Ghraib itself in the middle of the Sunni Triangle in a free-fire zone, a prison that is getting mortared on a daily basis, prisoners in tent cities behind razor wire that are getting mortared and have nowhere to go, people dying in an under-supplied, under-staffed, under-equipped military and an under-staffed, under-equipped, under-supplied, prison all of this – -everything — it’s hard to find anything about the place that is not a violation of Geneva. It’s one big massive obscene violation of Geneva."

"One of the sad things about all of this is it was all designed to produce intell — intelligence — even more specifically, it was all designed to find and kill Saddam… And Abu Ghraib is an expression of that foreign policy. Horrible pressures put on people to find Saddam, to find useful intell. And here’s the joke, the grim joke, I might add: They found out nothing about Saddam there; he was found by soldiers on the ground. It was not connected with our intelligence operation at all."

"There’s one photo that endlessly fascinates me. It’s Sabrina Harman with her thumb up smiling over the corpse of an Iraqi prisoner. I looked at the photo and thought, initially, what a monster. I now know she had nothing whatsoever to do with this man’s death and she was secretly taking photographs to prove that a murder had occurred and the U.S. military was attempting to cover it up. In fact the picture means something much closer to the opposite of what we think it means."