Errol Morris on 'Standard Operating Procedure'

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OSCAR-WINNING DOCUMENTARIAN ERROL MORRIS was going through photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal when his editor took note of a particular picture showing Army reservist Sabrina Harman posing over the dead body of an Iraqi prisoner.

"He couldn't get over Harman's smile," recollected Morris, director of 2004's "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara." "I said, 'What is the story here? The story isn't the smile. The story is this detainee!'"

Morris' new documentary, "Standard Operating Procedure," revisits the events at Abu Ghraib up to the publication of the now-famous photographs that depicted torture there and ended the careers of 12 soldiers. But the film also lays the groundwork for the broader story suggested by incidences such as Harman and the corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi.

"Some other people were responsible for the death and cover-up. But we have pictures of people smiling and giving thumbs-up over the body," Morris said. "So, who gets blamed for al-Jamadi's death? Threatened with prosecution? What does the public think when it sees the pictures?"

Those pictures, "Standard Operating Procedure" suggests, both broke the Abu Ghraib story and ended its investigation prematurely. They allowed those soldiers shown in them — while guilty of violating the law — to be scapegoats, targets of blame whose culpability precluded asking deeper questions.

"I am deeply suspicious about images. Photographs play into ideas we already have," Morris said. "They reinforce what we already think."

"Standard Operating Procedure" does not look for other culprits. The movie is a personal look at those involved; the stories by the soldiers do not show them to be either good or bad people — just, well, people.

"There's this idea that I should go after the big guys. That I should be a super-cop," Morris said. "The movie approaches the story on an almost microscopic level — there, it has something to teach us about us.

"My game was not the blame game. People ask me if I found the smoking gun," Morris said. "Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun."

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Photos by Nubar Alexanian/Sony Pictures Classics