Filmmaker Errol Morris, Abu Ghraib photos concealed as much as they revealed,& helped cover up

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For filmmaker Errol Morris, the Abu Ghraib photos concealed as much as they revealed, and helped cover up the larger truth

Sunday, June 01, 2008

Last summer, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris began writing Zoom, a blog about photography for The New York Times. In his blog, Morris examines how photographs, of both the still and moving variety, "attract false beliefs — as fly-paper attracts flies." We're often fooled by photographs, Morris has written, "because photography can make us think we know more than we really know."

The themes that Morris explores in Zoom — that it is necessary to understand what a photograph doesn't show us to understand what it does — are at the heart of his latest film, "Standard Operating Procedure," which opens Friday in Austin. Like "The Thin Blue Line," Morris' superlative 1988 documentary that helped overturn the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas police officer, "Standard Operating Procedure" is an investigative work. It seeks to determine whether the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were merely the work of a few "bad apples," as the military and the Bush administration publicly maintained, or the result of policies sanctioned and encouraged by civilian and military leaders.

For two years, Morris interviewed soldiers, interrogators and investigators, and examined letters, depositions, memos, and military and government reports to find the larger truth behind the infamous photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib. As he writes in his director's statement for the film, "The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there."

And what happened, Morris says, is that the seven military police soldiers convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib — Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, Sgt. Javal Davis, Cpl. Charles Graner, Spc. Sabrina Harman, Spc. Megan Ambuhl, Spc. Jeremy Sivits and Pfc. Lynndie England — were doing what they thought their superiors wanted done. Their job was to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation. Morris doesn't exonerate these soldiers, but he gives their actions context.

more:http://www.statesman.com/insight/content/editorial/stories/insight/06/01/0601morris.html