“WE HAVE always tortured — what’s new?” — is a sentiment I have heard in discussions about how the government conducts the “War on Terror.” And to a degree this is true, there are cases in the historical record of ordnance being purposefully dropped on civilian populations, which I think constitutes torture and not a strategic message, since it also falls under state sanctioned terror. There have also been isolated acts by renegade units who because of circumstance and peaked stress levels — even for war-time conditions — that have massacred innocents. My Lai being one highly documented case. But never (to our knowledge) has there been a top-down, procedural directive to do so like this at this level — to torture. What came out of the rooms of the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was a special arcane, ruthless and widely agreed by intelligence agencies and services across the world, ineffective policy.

When the pictures from Abu Gharib surfaced and articles began to be published about secret flights to secret prisons where no rules applied, an America that was beginning to lose its soul and me, my innocence, was starting to show. You see, I had always believed that while mistakes are made by the decisions makers and war is not something that should be held as a first, second, but only a final option; that those in charge at the very top would always look to fight them in the most humane and dignified way possible. And so my political realism, that war is unavoidable at times, was colliding with my idealism in the belief that we did not look to be evil. I was wrong. Yes, we do torture. Yes, our leaders can be evil.

Errol Morris has been one of the reasons why I look at the world in an exhaustive examination. (Not all of it, sadly, I find that I do not know enough about Darfur or sometimes conditions in my own communities). His films and series have always managed to inspire me to think and ask questions. Now he brings an incisive look at a microcosm of this open-ended and unclear “War on Terror,” by putting a lens on the Abu Gharib scandal. The war as it is now: mismanaged, culturally insensitive and many times illogical, like many things since that dreaded day in 2001 that catapulted America into the last eight years of what is looking like the fall of the empire, Morris may give us a better idea of what’s going on with our country through a critical lens focused on our leadership, and the interviewing of its charges. Standard Operating Procedure is the name of the film and as Morris says:

I think of the film as a nonfiction horror movie. The imagery is designed to take the viewer into the moment the photographs were taken, as well as to evoke the nightmarish, hallucinatory quality of Abu Gharib.