Abu Ghraib documentary screened at film festival

BERLIN: A searing documentary about the prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail premiered on Tuesday at the Berlin Film Festival, reopening one of the most shameful chapters of the US-led war.

In “Standard Operating Procedure”, Oscar-winning director Errol Morris uses recovered footage, reenactments and the notorious photographs published round the world to shed light on the forces behind the maltreatment of Iraqi inmates at the hands of US troops.

The film, screened at a press preview, avoids the familiar ground widely documented in the press after the first incriminating images surfaced in 2004: the global public outrage, the trials and the eventual apology by US President George Bush.

Instead, in probing interviews with the troops, Morris illustrates their contrition but also the defiance many involved in the abuse show as their superiors go unpunished.

The soldiers describe massive pressure from the highest echelons of the military to acquire “actionable intelligence” to stop the bloody insurgency in Iraq and locate then fugitive leader Saddam Hussein.

“We were told to soften them up for interrogation,” Specialist Lynndie England, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2005, tells Morris.

But the soldiers soon realised that the vast majority of the “high value” inmates at the prison, used as the primary interrogation centre in Iraq, were probably average family men with no involvement in attacks on US troops.

England, whose round face and thumbs-up sign were seen in a dozen key photographs depicting humiliation and beatings of Iraqi prisoners, speaks with bitterness about what she calls her minor role in the scandal.

England denounces her former fiance, Specialist Charles Graner, who was handed a 10-year sentence. Graner is depicted by England and others as a ringleader of the abuse but was not allowed to speak with Morris.

“Standard Operating Proce-dure”, the first documentary ever to enter the competition at the Berlinale, matches those films in its gripping presentation of complex material and indelible visual effects.

The title is a reference to the wide berth given to interrogators in the US-led war on terror, as officers explain that many of the shocking photographs to come out of Abu Ghraib represent acceptable techniques under current military policy.

The film is one of 21 pictures in the running for the festival’s prestigious Golden Bear top prize, to be awarded on Saturday.—AFP