crossing the line

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then whole volumes of disgust and dismay were generated by the horrifying photos that emerged from the US military prison in Iraq known as Abu Ghraib. A former torture center for deposed and now deceased dictator Saddam Hussein, the gigantic compound was the scene of unspeakable atrocities and murders during that notorious despot’s regime.

When American forces stormed through Baghdad, chasing Hussein from power, the world believed that places like Abu Ghraib would cease to exist under the seemingly benevolent reign of the US. Yet, inexplicably, we carried on as if we were part of Hussein’s Republican Guard and continued the very same practices we swore we’d protect the Iraqi people from.

Justice seemed to prevail, however, as the world media expressed righteous indignation over the images and the military tribunal system appeared to swing into quick action. Within three years of the revelations, a creepy-looking female soldier named Lynndie England who starred in many of the most harrowing photos has already been tried, done time for her involvement and been cast into the world stripped of her military honors.

But was that the whole story? Why were so many pictures of such horrific behavior taken? And were England and her peers really the epicenter of evil there, or merely the scapegoats for far more powerful people?

The world has wanted to know all of these things, and now documentarian Errol Morris has emerged with “Standard Operating Procedure,” his first film since his Oscar-winning 2004 documentary “The Fog of War,” perhaps the most thorough record to date of one of the lowest points of American foreign policy.

“I sincerely believe the press never gave any of these people a chance. No one wanted to hear from them, and for all intents and purposes they were monsters and should not be listened to,” says Morris, speaking one-on-one recently at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “That’s one big reason for making the movie: I was intrigued by the photos and the circumstances of when they were taken, and what was in them. You depend on the people involved to talk, and I amazed everyone at the studio, because Lynndie England was completely different than what we expected. You were given a very powerful story of a woman who has taken the blame in good measure for the entire war in Iraq.”

Indeed, the now 24-year-old England seems like a completely different person in “SOP” than she did in the still images that emerged from Abu Ghraib. Rather than appearing slow-witted at best and pathologically uncaring at worst, England emerges in the film as an eloquent and mordantly witty person who was blinded by youthful fear of and lust for a superior officer with whom she carried on an affair while he urged her into her perverse antics.

“Of course there’s a contrast with [media-and-military-manufactured war hero] Jessica Lynch, where people were led to believe someone was all good or all bad when it was far more complex than that,” says Morris. “I’ve taken some heat for humanizing Lynndie, but I’m proud of that and have no problem with it. It’s one of the things I try to do as a filmmaker and artist; extending sympathy where no one else has ever done that. It would be nice if she could be seen as a human being again and get on with her life.”

The interview footage of England and her fellow soldiers portrays a completely bungled system of command that left American troops uncertain about where interrogation techniques crossed the line into illegal torture. Often the soldiers were trying to speak up or outright stop the abuse of Iraqi prisoners but found themselves overruled by shadowy men who would not state their name or rank and told the troops they had no right to question the standard operating procedures employed at Abu Ghraib.

Much of the film features these soldiers, including England, speaking directly into the camera on an incredibly intimate level made possible by a Morris-invented camera technique termed Interrotron. But Morris also utilizes striking re-enactments and graphics in the same vein as his groundbreaking work in films such as “The Thin Blue Line” and “A Brief History of Time,” as well as hundreds of the disturbing photos to draw the viewer ever deeper into a madness that powerful elements in our government not only tolerated but apparently planned.

And yet the question remains: Why were the photos taken? Were they just for sick thrills, or was there a deeper purpose? While an investigator laughs at the soldiers involved near the start of the film, saying that criminals always make a “stupid” critical error in the commission of a crime, Morris believes there was much more going on.

“This was the first war with digital photography included and available, and the first one to include female soldiers powerfully. That combination of sex and photography is a major part of this story,” says Morris. “We’re all obsessed with taking photographs, not just them. They took the photographs in many instances to expose the military. One leader even thought this was proof of what he went through to explain to others later because he thought no one could believe his experience was that bad.

“Many soldiers took the pictures to protect themselves. The irony is that it destroyed them. They can sit with a thumb up in the air smiling next to a corpse because they want to expose a CIA murder, but no one charges the CIA — they charge her! That’s what’s so crazy. People start to think that photography is the crime here and it’s not. Part of the problem here is that we think we know the story and we don’t.”  

“Standard Operating Procedure” opens Friday at the Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Call (626) 844-6500.