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Director Errol Morris has taken the shocking photographs that have emerged from the Abu Ghraib hell-hole and built on them to come up with a searing indictment revealing how torture has been used against prisoners having the misfortune to fall into American hands. But there is more than what’s involved on the surface. By means of interviews with hands-on perpetrators, Morris paints a portrait of servicemen and women who know that their actions have been wrong, but justify them as carried out in the context of a situation that they feel wasn’t their fault.
The film points to the lack of going up higher on the military and political ladders to punish those who set a policy that would give those guarding and abusing the prisoners the feeling that this is what they should do. Some of the explanations of what has been done in this photograph or that one sound disturbingly like the Nazis saying they were following orders.
The pyramid structure of Morris’s documentary in effect tells us that the responsibility level has yet to reach the top, where it should be. The film also reveals what the Iraq War has done to the mindset of those fighting in it. With horrible things happening all around, the conditions are ripe for abuse. Some of the expressions of regret seem disingenuous, as there seems to have been too much fun had in the disgusting treatment of prisoners.
When you see this film, some of the faces and comments will become etched in your memory. This is a disturbing documentary, but a compelling one. A Sony Pictures Classics and Participant Productions release.
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