Though it took more than two decades for him to finally win an Oscar—2004's The Fog Of War was the film that finally caught the Academy's attention—director Errol Morris has long been considered one of his generation's premier documentary filmmakers. Morris' first feature, 1980's Gates Of Heaven, documented the owners and denizens of a California pet cemetery with humor and profound insight. Ever since, he's been drawn to the fringes of society, whether he's following the eccentric iconoclasts in A Brief History Of Time; Fast, Cheap, & Out Of Control; and Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall Of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., or the scapegoats of The Thin Blue Line and his revelatory new film about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure. Long after the photos of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib became yesterday's news, Morris continued to pursue the story vigorously, interviewing many of the people involved in producing those infamous shots. Standard Operating Procedure both defies the official line about the scandal and explores the very nature of photographs—what they tell us, what they don't tell us, and who gets to fill in the context. Morris recently spoke to The A.V. Club about Abu Ghraib, the film, and the difference between information and knowledge.
The A.V. Club: A picture is supposed to say a thousand words. But when it comes to wartime photographs like the ones from Abu Ghraib or the flag planting at Iwo Jima, how many of those words tend to be lies?
Errol Morris: It depends, of course, on context. The chance that any given sentence is a lie, rather than a truth, I think, is fairly great. An intentional lie, a self-deception, a misconception—there are lots of categories of untruth, not one grab bag. Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things. Part of what I have been writing about, part of what this movie is about, is actually how these photographs played both roles.
AVC: Then it becomes a war over the context, doesn't it? In this case, the "few rotten apples" defense vs. what you're hearing from the people who are actually taking the photographs, and appear in them.
EM: It's been interesting to me. Both left and right see these guys as monsters. They're not different in that respect. I think we all have this great need for scapegoats. Everybody loves a good scapegoat—a good monster, if you like. They serve and satisfy, I think, a deep need. The left will say they're monsters because of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. The right will say they're monsters of their own devising, they're rogue soldiers, et cetera, et cetera. Everybody sees them as bad, and the movie is an attempt to make them people again, to show who they are, to address the question of why the pictures were taken, and what they show.
AVC: No one ranked above Staff Sergeant served any time, but when the story broke, there was talk about razing Abu Ghraib, and a major backlash against the Bush administration. None of that happened. How was the response to this scandal so limited?
EM: I think it's one of the central questions, one of the central mysteries about this story. The photographs come out—this was April, May of 2004—Sy Hersh publishes his article in the New Yorker and 60 Minutes II does its program on the photographs. And then all of a sudden, it's spun. We live in such a polarized society. And it's one of the remarkable things about America today. Everything is political football. And the photographs very quickly became political football. Whatever evidence was contained in those photographs was lost in arguments about who was responsible. It became very quickly a blame game, and the attempt to really look beyond the photographs and to Abu Ghraib, to the reality of what was happening there—lost. I find it utterly amazing. I mean, when you ask me this question, I think, "Uh-oh. I better come up with an answer. I should have an answer to this." I don't have an answer to it. I think one of the possible answers is that it became politicized so quickly that people argued about it rather than investigated it. And the investigations themselves, all 13 of them, from the military and from Congress, to me were more attempts to obfuscate than to actually investigate anything at all. They seemed like some extended filibuster.
AVC: Doesn't it take time to contextualize stories like this properly? Maybe the problem is that the story goes dead before you know the story. It took you quite a long time to make this movie, and certainly you didn't know everything that you now know about what happened.
EM: No, I knew very, very little. And my conception of all of these events changed as I was making the movie. Most certainly. It's just a weird time. It's a weird time with respect to our desire to investigate stuff. You poke around in the recesses of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and The New York Review Of Books, and you can find this article and that article. But connecting the dots has been something… See I think that looking at the bad apples is a way into a story that everybody thinks they know, but they don't know. The minute you start to see them as people, you see them as wrestling with ethical questions themselves. You see them in the middle of this place which can only be described as bedlam. You realize that everything at Abu Ghraib was a violation of Geneva.
AVC: The location is a violation of Geneva, for one. You're not supposed to have prisoners of war in the middle of a war zone.
EM: That's correct. You're also not supposed to kidnap people's children in order to make them talk. You're not supposed to engage in all kinds of humiliation, sexual and otherwise. You know, it's a long, long, long, long list. I would sit and I would read The New York Times, not so many months ago, people rallying against the destruction of these two CIA tapes, involving the interrogation of [Guantanamo detainee Abu] Zubaydah. And I would ask myself, "Do people not know that they destroyed all the evidence in a prison of 10,000 people?" It's strange. We have more information—a glut of information—than ever before, and perhaps less knowledge. That's what's peculiar. And the only way you can deal with it, I suppose, is to make fun of it. I would rather watch Comedy Central for the news than I'd like to watch any other program on television. Maybe that shows you the state of affairs.
You could say that Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report are cynical, but I think in a way, they're the least cynical news shows on television, because they actually have standards. They are willing to speak up, in their own unmistakable way, about stuff that they think is just unbearably stupid and criminal. Not cynical. I think quite the contrary.
AVC: How did you first start constructing this documentary?
EM: My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.
AVC: Was it difficult to gain access to the soldiers involved, or were they eager to tell their story?
EM: Really difficult. That's the hardest part of doing an investigative movie, is getting people to talk to you, which was a nightmare in this instance. There's a kind of code of silence in the military. First of all, many of the people involved are career soldiers. By speaking out, they risk careers, pensions, future employment, etc. Very, very difficult to get people to talk. It's getting a little bit easier now that I've made the movie. Now I get phone calls from people that I wanted to talk to that wouldn't talk to me, now interested in talking for the first time. [Former Brigadier General Janis] Karpinski, of course, was the easiest because she was a public figure, she had been making the rounds of various public forums, and she had appeared on C-SPAN. Not so hard to get her to agree on an interview. She is incredibly angry.
I used to work as a private detective years and years ago. And my boss gave me this one very simple piece of advice about trying to figure out who to interview first in any investigation. His recommendation: Always pick the people who were fired. Pick the people who are pissed off. And Janis Karpinski is a woman who is very, very, very angry. Another scapegoat, I believe. Just so we're clear, when I say this person is a scapegoat, am I at the same time saying they're lily-white? That everything they did was absolutely correct? Are they utterly blameless? I don't think that's true of any of these characters, and I wouldn't make that argument. But Karpinski and others were scapegoated. Make no mistake. We all play this kind of crazy blame game. Maybe reality's just too goddamned complicated, that we need to grotesquely simplify it in order to make it manageable, otherwise we'd all go mad. You know [contract interrogator Tim] Dugan, one of my very favorite characters, says at the end of the movie that there are two alternatives: We can stay and they'll kill each other and us, or we can leave, and then they'll just kill each other. It's a bleak, despairing assessment of it all. [Laughs.]
I wish they'd just get it over with and make [Iraq] the 51st state, because I think it's the perfect red state: religious fundamentalists, lots of weaponry. How could you go wrong? We're already spending a significant fraction of our gross national product on the infrastructure; such as it is, on Iraq. Make it the 51st state and get it over with. [Laughs.]
AVC: So what about some of these other figures? You talk about going to the people who are fired first. Some of these, the Sabrina Harmans, the Lynndie Englands, these are people who were fired, in a way, because they can't rely on the military as a career anymore.
EM: Well, they're one step beyond fired. They're fired and incarcerated.
AVC: Right. Presumably the incarceration part presented a roadblock for you.
EM: Well, when they were in prison it was a roadblock, because the military wasn't giving any access to any people when they were in prison. It's still not. I have no access to [reservist and alleged "ringleader"] Chuck Graner. [Staff Sergeant] Ivan Frederick got out very late in the game, too late to be included in this movie. I would love to interview both of them at some future time. You know, I've invested enough in this story, I'm curious enough in this whole story, that I would love to talk to them in the future. I want to set up this whole archive with all of the information that I've gathered. I think there's a lot of interesting stuff that I've been able to dig up. The question is, what do I do with it? I mean, the movie is one thing, and so is the book, which comes out in May. I have my whole array of Abu Ghraib products. I feel like the Fuller Brush guy, with a whole number of things in my sample kit. [Laughs.] But I think I've been able to unearth really interesting stuff, and I would like to make all of it public. My first step is putting this movie into distribution.
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