Abu Ghraib revisited

Errol Morris's documentary includes interviews with soldiers but not prisoners.

In "Standard Operating Procedure," Errol Morris gives the US soldiers of Abu Ghraib back their humanity. Why would he want to? We've looked upon the face of PFC Lynndie England. We know she's a monster.

One of the movie's points, though, is that we shouldn't make the same mistake she did. "Standard Operating Procedure" features interviews with five of the seven soldiers indicted on charges of prisoner abuse. Against the soldiers' finger-pointing and weary admissions of guilt, Morris places the photographic evidence of Abu Ghraib - a tidal wave of data that almost swamps the movie. Nearly every humiliation possible to be visited upon a human being is here, at one point stitched together in a sort of heinous flip-book timeline.

Morris is out to indict the entire US military intelligence structure by examining what it does to its lowest echelon personnel, both before they're busted and after. He doesn't forgive the men and women of the 372d Military Police Company, but he is curious about what the pressures of isolation, fear, groupthink, and rank can do to an uneducated young person in the middle of nowhere. "Standard Operating Procedure" takes pains to distinguish between the grunt MPs, who did the actual "questioning," and the shadowy "ghosts" from the CIA who'd swoop in with high-ranking suspects. One of these ended up dead after an interrogation; when Specialist Sabrina Harman took a photo of the body packed in ice, it was she who was prosecuted.

England, too, finally gets her close-up courtesy of Morris's cameras. Five years, prison time, and motherhood have made her face puffier than the avid young torturer-chipmunk of the Abu Ghraib photos. Her eyes are dead, or maybe they're just wised up. She has some excuses for what she did but she still doesn't seem sure why she did it.

You wish Morris had been able to speak with a prisoner or two, as well; in enshrining them as victims, the movie denies them individuality all over again. Still, the movie's a staggering work that traces the rotten blossom of this scandal close to its roots. When an investigator labels the iconic image of an Iraqi prisoner standing on a crate "standard operating procedure" - as opposed to prosecutable criminal abuse - a chill runs through the film. "They weren't doing torture, per se," he says. It's in that bottomless "per se" that we're living as a country today. ($28.96, Sony)

Extras: director's commentary, deleted scenes, trailer (Sony, $28.96)