“This place will make Abu Ghraib look like the Four Seasons. We’ll need a car battery, some wires, and someone who can REALLY point at genitalia.” – Montgomery Burns, “The Simpsons”

What a difference a few digital photos can make. Mass kidnapping, physical and psychological torture of mostly innocent men, and a few odd murders by U.S. forces came to light during the spring of 2004 – all because of some pictures of prisoners and army personnel engaged in a grotesque form of psychosexual roleplaying. There was an investigation, and punishment was meted out to the very unsuccessful and amateurish military interrogators deemed responsible for the outrages at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (“The Fog of War,” “The Thin Blue Line ”) is a master of far more effective methods of interrogation, and he is here to remind us that, at least in the eyes of the U.S. government, the real crimes of the “few bad apples” was not what the pictures depicted, but the existence of the pictures themselves.

At its best, “Standard Operating Procedure” is comprised of interviews with the former residents of the repurposed prison that had been the scene of some 30,000 murders under Saddam Hussein. The interviews come from an array of sometimes extremely sympathetic former U.S. military personnel, many of whom have served jail time, and one contractor who all explain how they basically wandered into hell and were handed a pitchfork.  The best-known interview subject is Lynndie England, who became infamous for her bizarre camera poses next to suffering, naked Iraqi prisoners. Even those prone to distrust the government version of this fiasco-within-a-fiasco were inclined to judge Ms. England harshly.  However, as Morris makes clear, a photograph is a discrete moment in time and tells you very little about the moments that precede and follow. The sickening pictures of England smoking a cigarette and pointing at an unclothed man’s penis and of her standing arm in arm with boyfriend Charles Graner behind a naked human pyramid are worth at least a thousand words each, but there are millions more words left out of the photos.

Read the rest at Bullz-Eye.com.