- Title: GERMANY: Abu Ghraib documentary tells grim story behind the photos
- Date: 13th February 2008
- Summary: (W5) BERLIN, GERMANY (FEBRUARY 12, 2008) (REUTERS) ERROL MORRIS, DIRECTOR "STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE" ARRIVES FOR PRESS CONFERENCE BERLINALE LOGO (SOUNDBITE) (English) ERROL MORRIS, DIRECTOR OF STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE, SAYING: "The story isn't just these soldiers, these very few soldiers as if somehow they are culpable for everything they did in Iraq. That's just n
- Embargoed: 29th February 2008 03:54
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- Location: Germany
- Country: Germany
- Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment
- Reuters ID: LVA62PCQSTNZQ8BHNXJR8O4LY6FE
- Aspect Ratio: 4:3
- Story Text: Pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shocked the world and dealt a powerful blow to America's image abroad when they were first published in the spring of 2004.
Four years later, a new documentary from U.S. director Errol Morris delves beneath the haunting photographs to tell the story of the low-level soldiers who unwittingly sparked the scandal by meticulously documenting their abuse of Iraqi detainees.
Combining interviews of the soldiers themselves with images of the infamous abuse snapshots, nightmarish slow-motion re-enactments and previously unseen video footage, "Standard Operating Procedure" is a chilling glimpse of life in a prison described as reeking of "urine, faeces and body rot."
"The story isn't just these soldiers, these very few soldiers as if somehow they are culpable for everything they did in Iraq. That's just not so," Morris told journalists in Berlin on Tuesday (February 12).
"It's a bigger, a broader and actually I would have to say a far more appalling story, a story that has not been told and I hope to begin telling it with this movie," the filmmaker added.
His film is an indictment of U.S. military leaders, from Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld down, who set up Abu Ghraib as a make-shift jail in the months after the U.S. invasion and then handed over the reins to a group of frightened, ill-equipped army grunts.
The soldiers tell Morris how truckloads of Iraqis, including children, were plucked randomly off the streets of Baghdad like cattle and brought to the prison to be abused, beaten and sexually humiliated.
One grainy video shows naked Iraqis being piled up in a pyramid.
Another shows them lined up and forced to masturbate.
Lynndie England, the squat private who was shown holding a naked Iraqi on a leash in one of the most shocking photos from Abu Ghraib, comes off as a particularly naive, tragic character.
Only 20-years old when she arrived in Abu Ghraib, she fell in love with Charles Graner, the apparent ringleader of the group, later having his baby only to be rejected by him for another female soldier in the prison.
"To me, this was a story about these soldiers who took the blame, and a story about these photographs that revealed to the world part, that is only part, but part of Abu Ghraib," said Morris.
Morris uses the same unique technology which helps interviewees stare directly into the camera that he developed for "The Fog of War", his award-winning 2003 film about Vietnam-era Pentagon chief Robert S. McNamara.
Like that movie, "Standard Operating Procedure", is a sober film which strives for balance and contrasts with Brian de Palma's sensational 2007 drama "Redacted", which was also based on real-life U.S.
atrocities in Iraq.
All the soldiers Morris talked to, including former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski -- the highest-ranking casualty of Abu Ghraib -- see themselves as scapegoats for superiors, who they say condoned the abuse or simply looked the other way.
As the film opens, Rumsfeld is seen paying a visit to Abu Ghraib only weeks before the abuse in the photos took place. After a cursory inspection, he cuts the visit short:
"I don't need to see anything else," Karpinski quotes him as saying.
Morris hopes the film will show that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the product of a broader American military machine gone horribly wrong.
"To me, these pictures were very important. They rendered an important social service. Without them, we would know nothing. We would be blind to this moment in history. And one of the things that I hope to do with this film is bring us into that history and to force us to think about it," he said. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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