Written by Doug Johnson

Already playing in New York City and opening in Los Angeles this Friday is “Standard Operating Procedure” - the new Errol Morris film about the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Do you remember a few years ago when a series of photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison hit the media and caused all sorts of headaches for the military? In the photos you could see some of our military personnel treating the prisoners like they were less than human. The photos offered tangible proof of what the military would do behind the scenes, where the cameras usually weren’t allowed to go. 

Shortly after the photos got leaked, the military did some pretty awful things to try and bury the story. And, due to some of the photos already getting released, they were going to have to blame at least a few people for the actions that took place. Even if…they were told to do it.

Errol Morris’s new film shows how the photographs served as both an expose and a cover-up. An expose, because the photographs offered us a glimpse of the horror of what was happening at Abu Ghraib…and a cover-up because they seduced people into thinking what they saw was an aberration limited to a few rouge soldiers on the nightshift.  
 
Abu Ghraib was a dangerous, disordered place.  Understaffed, undersupplied, under unremitting mortar attack, but nonetheless, it was no accident that these abuses happened.  The film explores the context of these photographs.  The story of the photographs.  Why were they taken?  What was happening outside the frame? Everybody knew about the photographs but no one knew what the photographs were about.  Morris’ goal here was to talk to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs – to understand the photographs and the people who took them.
 
Finally, the film is about a group of young people sent to war.  As such, it is a war story, a story of a cover-up, and a story of how a small group of lowly soldiers were blamed for policy decisions and a war out of control. Abu Ghraib was a world in which almost no one was trained for the tasks they were asked to perform, where everyone knew what was going on, and where no one wanted to blow the whistle.  A world in which the rules were torn up, a world in which law was redefined as lawlessness.  Morris says “My last film, 'The Fog of War,’ was about a person that was at the apex of power, Robert McNamara.  With this new one, I wanted to make a film about the people at the bottom of the pyramid, 'the little guys.’  A story that I think the world needs to see and hear.”

So to help promote the film, we’ve been provided with 11 movie clips and the trailer…all of which are below.

Finally, if you’d like to hear what Errol Morris had to say about the movie, here’s a link to the MP3 of a roundtable that Frosty did with the great filmmaker. Again, “Standard Operating Procedure” is playing in limited release right now and it’ll be expanding in May.

Standard Operating Procedure Movie Trailer

Movie Clip 1 – 1st day at the prison

Movie Clip 2 – That’s what military intelligence does

Movie Clip 3 – Somebody does something stupid

Movie Clip 4 – It was because of a man

Movie Clip 5 – That’s disgusting

Movie Clip 6 – I lost it

more clips on page 2 ------>

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