Standard Operating Procedure, 2008

A very good documentary that includes interviews with many of the Americans most intimately involved with the photographed incidents. However, the story it tells concentrates on a couple of idiosyncratic viewpoints that tend to warp it and limit its scope: 1) that the soldiers in the photos were railroaded in an attempt to shield higher-ups from responsibility (and the film makes this case persuasively), and 2) that the nature of photography and of our relationship to photographic evidence can be one that distorts the truth and leads people to adhere quickly and strongly to mistaken impressions. (You can see more of this latter persepctive in the New Yorker article from Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris on the subject from earlier this year.) This all has the result of pushing the victimized prisoners into the background of the story (none of them or their families are interviewed in the film) and making them props in a drama about America and Americans and what this all meant to us. And while it’s easy to come to sympathize somewhat with these soldiers over the course of the film — they certainly come off more sympathetically than they do in the grinning, thumbs-up abuse shots we’re all familiar with, and there’s certainly no justice in laying what happened at Abu Ghraib entirely at their feet — it’s still remarkable how much, to them, what happened is all about them and what they suffered, and how little they refer to their victims and who they were and what their stories were and what ever happened to them.

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