Standard Operating Procedure (***)

Errol Morris’s Abu Ghraib film has a certain redundancy with Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning documentary about the US military’s systematic abuse of detainees in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and at Guantanamo Bay. However, the focus is more narrow here, looking at the faces, like Lynndie England, famously shot holding a leash attached to an Iraqi prisoner, behind the photos that turned prisoner abuse into an instant scandal. It’s slightly better than Taxi at explaining the thinking of the individuals, mostly low-ranking military police, who participated in abuse or failed to report it, but not as good at placing it in the wider perspective of what was going on outside the prison.

Hannah Arendt’s coinage “the banality of evil” came to my mind while watching this. England and others have a lot to say about what went down, but aren’t especially articulate about why. Morris leaves you to judge their culpability for yourself, but none of these people seem extraordinary save, perhaps, the absent Charles Graner. Graner, boyfriend to England and artistic genius behind the naked prisoner pyramid, was still in prison and could not be interviewed for the film. Janice Karpinski, who was supposed to be in charge of Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi facilities, appears to defend herself, but I was never quite clear to what extent she was saying she didn’t know what was going on and to what extent she was saying she was following orders. In any case, she adds only a little to the explanation of how it all happened, and there are neither military experts nor Army higher-ups to explain more about the orders that were given, and why. The result is yet another indictment of US policy that leaves much more to be explained.

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viewed 6/4/08 (Ritz Bourse); reviewed 6/5-6/08

Taxi to the Dark Side (***1/2)

Alex Gibney won the Academy Award for this documentary over, among other films, the Iraq war chronicle No End in Sight. Using the story of of an Afghani cab driver, Dilawar, as a jumping point, Gibney portrays the moral failures that have accompanied the global war on terror declared by President Bush. As with Gibney’s previous effort, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the movie is a triumph of reportage rather than filmmaking technique. The tape of Enron employees blatantly manipulating the California energy market finds its equivalent in the autopsy footage of Dilawar’s beaten corpse, the death certificate reading “homicide,” and the famous photographs and films of blatant prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. All this is attested to by, among others, military police who were, much later, charged in the death of Dilawar.

No officers were convicted of abuse in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanemo Bay, where prisoners continue to be held, but Gibney clearly connects the abuses in all of these places to tacit and explicit policies of the administration promulgated by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Department of Justice counsel John Yoo. Yoo wrote legal memoranda suggesting that no treaty, and perhaps no act of Congress, impeded the president’s ability to order torture. By removing or failing to enforce the restrictions that limited abuse, these higher-ups created the climate that encouraged a lawless climate to persist, punished the innocent, and produced no additional quantity of useful intelligence. (In fact, a coerced confession was the basis Colin Powell would use in his UN speech to suggest a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; the link and the confession were both later discredited.)

There are many tentacles to this tale, more than I can describe. The film is divided into thematic segments, and lacks a strong narrative thread. The story of Dilawar, who died after five days in US custody, only takes up a small portion of the film. Nonetheless, Gibney utilizes a range of voices and makes a strong case that, whatever the merits of the war on terror, the battle against it has produced unnecessary victims and unintelligent “intelligence.”


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viewed and reviewed 3/4/08