Posted on Thu, Jun. 19, 2008

Seeing isn’t necessarily believing.

Take those photos of American service personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

You know the ones … the human pyramid of naked men. The photos of prisoners forced to masturbate with bags over their heads. The hooded inmate standing on a box with electrical wires trailing from his fingers.

And especially that photo of a young soldier named Lynndie England “walking the dog” — actually a naked prisoner lying on the cold concrete with a leash around his neck.

We’ve seen the photos and we think we know what they mean. But as Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris shows in “Standard Operating Procedure” (opening today at the Tivoli), there’s more behind those images than we could have imagined.

Morris — whose resume includes “The Thin Blue Line,” “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” and “The Fog of War” — employs his own standard operating procedure: lots of head-on interviews, documentary re-staging of certain events and impressionistic camerawork and editing.

There’s no narration. Morris gives us the story in fragments. But pay attention … and be appalled.

The film works on a couple of levels — one fairly conventional and the other extremely subtle. In interviews with the participants — from former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge at Abu Ghraib, to lowly grunts like England, who ended up doing jail time — we discover a hideously overcrowded prison often under mortar fire from insurgents.

The soldiers who served as guards — most of them young, few of them well-educated, many of them women — saw CIA interrogators use extreme measures against prisoners and sometimes followed suit.

Though he never points a finger (“SOP” appears to be scrupulously evenhanded), Morris has built a damning indictment against a military that engages in wholesale roundups of citizens (and then doesn’t provide the wherewithal to care for them), suspends due process and engages in torture, insulating the brass from responsibility while letting enlisted personnel take the heat.

In this regard the film doesn’t offer much that we haven’t already seen in other films, such as the Oscar-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side.”

What’s especially intriguing is Morris’ take on just what those photos mean. He looks into the circumstances in which they were taken and finds that they were less the result of malice than indifference. Boredom and fear provided a fertile medium for misbehavior among the grunts — and that misbehavior was often recorded. Apparently every American in Iraq has a camera or camera phone.

When a prisoner died at the hands of CIA personnel, the guards posed with the corpse, just because it seemed like a cool thing to do. They gave the thumbs up because, in the words of one, you look stupid if you just stand there.

Some of the worst abuses were dreamed up by Army Spc. Charles Graner, who was England’s lover at the time and pushed her to pose for photos with submissive prisoners.

Graner is still in prison and unavailable for interviews, but amazingly most of the participants, who already have served sentences, were eager to face Morris’ camera and tell their side of the story.

Many still are stunned that the photos created such a fuss. To them it was no big deal.

There’s yet a third thread running through “SOP”: an investigation by Brent Pack with the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, who in the wake of the scandal analyzed the hundreds of photos taken by guards to determine which acts were clearly illegal and which — like the routine humiliation of prisoners — were simply “standard operating procedure.”

Apparently it’s difficult for a non-expert to tell the difference.

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