Errol Morris, a documentary film director, lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Standard Operating Procedure was produced in 2008 in the USA.
Errol Morris: Part of the problem with talking about images, photographic images in particular, and violence, is that people really don’t understand photography to begin with. They don’t understand the effect that images have on us, how we deal with images, how we often make inappropriate inferences from images. Probably because when our brains were put together by natural selection, sight was given this privileged place among the senses. We think that having seen something – even if it’s in a photograph – that we’ve seen some piece of reality that we know what we’re looking at, and we can make inferences from it accordingly. My movie
Standard Operating Procedure is about how we can’t make those kinds of inferences. That there are all kinds of hidden assumptions in photographs – and in the process of looking at photographs. I’m sure that you’ve read about so-called ‘selection effects’, where we think that having seen a part of the whole, that we’re seeing everything. And the Abu Ghraib photographs are a perfect example of that sort of thing. Because we think we’ve seen Abu Ghraib, and we think that we’ve seen the crimes that were committed at Abu Ghraib, when in fact what we’ve seen is a couple of hundred images which were taken during a very restricted period of time on Tier 1A of the prison during the fall of 2003. And the real story of Abu Ghraib is in no way contained in those images. Nor do those images contain the worst of the violence. Nor do those images tell you the role of the Defense Department and the White House and the policies with respect to ‘detainees’ carried out at Abu Ghraib. None of the above. And I would have these endless discussions with Philip Gourevitch – we put out this book together, based on the transcripts of the interviews for the film.
1 His fascination with the ocular proof – the demand made by Othello to Iago – ‘Give me the ocular proof’ – and the irony here, of course, is that Othello gets what he considers to be the ‘ocular proof’ but it’s no proof at all. In fact, he makes the incorrect inference from it, namely the inference that Desdemona is unfaithful, and kills her. So, I have a different attitude about photography and images and war that comes from a very, very different place to, say someone like Susan Sontag, who is concerned about the relationship between distancing, empathy and violence.
Joshua Oppenheimer: I think that your work has dealt for a very long time with the way images, cinema, movie images, television, photography as well, are implicated in how we see ourselves, in the stories we tell about violence, and how we respond socially, politically, judicially, to violence. I was thinking about this interview, going back twenty years to The Thin Blue Line [1988], and I was thinking of Emily Miller’s love of detective movies. And what your film reveals is that the detective movies that Emily Miller watched seem to have conditioned what she thinks she saw. She probably thought she saw the things that she thought she saw because she somehow had seized Randall Adams’ trial as an opportunity to project herself, or somehow to stage herself, or transform herself into the star witness that she’d always wanted to be. And I felt also, thinking about this, Doctor Grigson. Doctor Grigson also has his own habits of misinterpretation, that seem probably very sound to him, but that are probably based on very generic ways of imagining, very generic ways of seeing, that leave him also blind to the specificities of virtually every case, or many of the cases, that he examines.
EM: I think that’s absolutely true.
JO: And I had this feeling that in a way, as a series of moving images, in a series – that these ingrained habits of seeing that your characters in that film have – had very, very serious consequences. Indeed, they were going to cause Randall Adams to be killed. And as a series of moving images, The Thin Blue Line
somehow intervenes in what was really a moment of violence that was about to – an imminent moment of violence – to prevent the killing, and to do so by somehow assembling testimony and then also what I for lack of a better word will call ‘dramatisation’, but I think it somehow assembles these things in such a way as to reveal that something else might have happened, that the characters were unable and unwilling to see, because of ingrained habits of seeing, fantasies, prejudices, projections that had left these people blind to so much of the picture. And even in the case of Emily Miller, she turns out to have vision problems. She sees – she imagines that she saw things that she couldn’t have seen, or at least she enjoys saying that.
EM: She, like all of us, confabulates – conflates reality with other things. This is a general problem, which I believe is exacerbated, not caused, but just exacerbated, by the proliferation of all kinds of media. My view on this is that when natural selection put our brains together, it didn’t have a set of pigeonholes, where you can say ‘This came from Fox News’, ‘This came from reality’, ‘This came from the New York Times’, ‘This came from the Weekly World News’ or the ‘National Enquirer’ – ‘This came from The Sun’ – whatever. We are, you know, in a sea of information. And, you know the story that I always like to tell is a story about Ross McElwee’s Six O’clock News. I was directing a commercial on the beach in Santa Monica, and I was with the producer from the agency – Iddo Patt, who was Ross’s student at Harvard. And so I’m talking to him and I said, ‘You know, it’s strange, the last time I was on this pier, I was watching them film Baywatch.’ And he said to me, ‘No you weren’t. You were watching Ross’s film where he shows them filming Baywatch.’ And I realized, Oh my god, he’s absolutely right.
I mean, we’re all in that position, but some people – like Emily Miller – are more susceptible to confabulation and confusion than others. You know, is it easier for some people to believe complete nonsense than others. If there were the choice, for example, between Emily Miller and Bertrand Russell, I would say Emily Miller was more likely to become utterly confused about her experiences, but, nevertheless, it happens to all of us. It’s a problem, which can infect anybody, and how they see the world. It’s unavoidable.
JO: In Standard Operating Procedure I have this feeling that you’ve done something that is quite profoundly similar, but also different than The Thin Blue Line in that it’s we, the public, who are the people who have misperceived the evidence. And that misperception of the Abu Ghraib photographs, which was encouraged by the government, has led us to misperceive ourselves and our own complicity or involvement or engagement in what happened, and what was continuing to happen when the film was released.
EM: One thing that’s absolutely clear to me is that the photographs worked to the advantage of the administration, and you would say, well, how could this possibly be? Wasn’t this one of the worst scandals in American history? The answer is, yes it was, but in the end, it focused attention, I believe inappropriately, on a very small group of people who were responsible for little or nothing, and directed attention away from people who were far more complicit in what happened in that prison. And that’s what I mean by a selection effect – very specifically – is that you look at the photographs and you think that’s all there is – and you make inferences from that collection of photographs. Well if you see in the photographs the same soldiers appearing again and again and again – by the way, because they were the ones who took the pictures – then you make the inference that all of the crimes really came from them, and that every picture that you see is a picture of a crime. And all of those are inappropriate inferences. I mean it’s one of the things that truly fascinates me; how a seeming disaster – a public relations disaster – for the Bush administration (not that they consciously did this – I think that they just fell into it), they were able to manipulate it to their advantage, and it became a different kind of issue. Photographs can be responsible for incredible misperceptions. And not because of what these newspapers are all afraid of; they’re all afraid of Photoshop, or in a digital manipulation of one kind or another – I’m prone to pointing out that all you have to do to change a photograph is change the caption. And you don’t even have to do that, because we all come to photographs with a certain set of expectations and beliefs that determine what we see, or at the very least, can influence what we see, and prevent further investigation.
JO: The irony here is that we tend to think of photographs as revealing rather than concealing, but the opposite turns out to be the case. Because they make visible only fragments, contingent on a frame, a moment in time, a point of view, and between each photograph in a series of snapshots there is a blindspot, just as there is between shots in a film. We make sense of these gaps. We make up stories to fill these gaps, these blindspots, and these stories are shaped by our storytelling traditions, conventions, our habits of viewing, our inclination to identify good guys and bad guys, simplistic and generic ways of imagining. In the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, top administration personnel concocted and promulgated the ‘bad apple narrative’ to help us fill in the gaps between and around each photo, and thereby transforming photographic evidence of what in fact was a vast, premeditated and institutionally sanctioned crime (a criminal standard operating procedure) into a tool in the cover up of that same crime. The irony is that photographic evidence of a crime became tools in a cover-up, allegories for the visible become mechanisms of blindness.
EM: That’s correct.
JO: Subjected to the wrong interpretive framework, the photos themselves slip into the blindspots that lie between them. And part of your work as a detective in Standard Operating Procedure
was to gather other evidence – Sabrina’s diaries, the photographs’ metadata, and so on – to show that the bad apple story couldn’t really be true. In this sense, then, the film was as much an exposé about the misuse of photography as the criminal torture and detention policy.
EM: I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which is based on the atrocities in the Congo – the same atrocities that are at the heart of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, by the way. At one point, Twain gives King Leopold the line, ‘Ah, Kodak: the only witness I have been unable to bribe.’ And I always thought, well yes, it’s the only witness you were unable to bribe, but it’s still a witness. And when the witness takes the stand you don’t know what they is going to say.
JO: There’s something about the misleading visibility of photographs, as if somehow through their graphicness or their explicitness we become passive or dazzled by the image itself and suspend any critical judgement. We accept whatever story they seem to support. It’s as though the visibility deflects any attention from what remains invisible, that which is around the frame, or after, before or after the shutter was clicked. I think that goes back to the question of how the government was able to use the Abu Ghraib photos in the way they did. These photos are not taken from afar, with a telephoto lens, providing some kind of an objective document of a crime from without, as it were. Instead they are artifacts from the crime, they are part of the crime, or at least they appear to be.
EM: And in many cases the photographs, which appear to be of crimes, are not of crimes.
JO: Like Al Jamadi’s body.
EM: Well, that’s a crime, but not a crime committed by the MPs who were on the Tier that night: not by Fredrick, Graner, or Sabrina Harman, it was a crime committed by the CIA. And the Navy Seals.
There are other instances where it’s not at all well known that there were crazy people housed in the prison, and housed on these tiers as well. One of them, a character nicknamed ‘Shitboy’, who covered himself with shit at every opportunity. And they were charged with his management as well. He also had the habit of banging his head against the wall. So you see these various videos of Shitboy, and you see this video of him banging his head against the wall, and the inference of course is that the MPs were responsible for this, or did nothing to try to stop it. And both are incorrect inferences in my opinion.
JO: The thing about the photographs that’s also disturbing is this sort of ambiguity about what they actually are.
EM: I think it’s important to remember that there is an inherent ambiguity in almost every photograph. Those photographs, I would say, are particularly ambiguous in this sense: I can remember more or less when I first saw them, and think ‘What in God’s name am I looking at here?’ ‘What is going on?’ ‘What is this?’ The pictures seemed so weird, so nightmarish, that they begged all kinds of questions. That doesn’t mean that when we look at a seemingly innocuous image, that we aren’t doing something very much the same.
JO: The strange thing about the Abu Ghraib photos is partly that they’re staged as snapshots, or they appear to be. And to be seen and looked at and enjoyed by the reminiscing photographers and their friends afterwards. And they appear to be oriented towards a specific audience, which is themselves, and their friends, who might enjoy them later.
EM: I don’t think that’s true in all cases, and I think it’s another idea about the Abu Ghraib photographs that persists. When the photographs were first brought to the attention of the public by Sy Hersh and by Sixty Minutes, Susan Sontag wrote a piece that appeared in the New York Times Magazine, one of the best pieces that she has written on photography, in my opinion. And she decried what she thought was the most unspeakable aspect of the images, namely that they seem to be celebratory, or that they were these snapshots that soldiers took of themselves in order to remember their good times at Abu Ghraib. Again, this is a fiction that is not entirely true.
I think everybody wants some kind of simple explanation that tells you everything that you need to know about a story. Another example is Sabrina Harman. If you really believe that this was thrill-seeking, that this was even more craven because people were taking pictures of their own war crimes without even realising the moral content, or the immoral content, of what they were doing, it’s belied by the letters that Sabrina wrote back to her girlfriend, Kelley, in the United States. Now here’s what’s interesting to me: when the letters were shown to people in the movie – I would have rough-cut screenings, show the letters, and talk about the letters, etc – people would say, ‘Those letters are fake, they were probably sent after the fact’, ‘They were written for an audience that would eventually see them and could serve to exonerate her.’ Well, for what it’s worth, I just think that’s far-fetched,
recherché explanation. The letters themselves contain too much bad stuff to be seen as merely self-serving. And I truly believe they were written at the time. And they talk about Sabrina’s desire to use the photographs as evidence. I have never spoken to Graner. Graner remains in deep lock-up in Leavenworth to this day. My guess is that part of the reason the photographs were taken in ordered series – because that seems very odd and neurotic way to take snapshots – to provide evidence of what they were being asked to do.
JO: She says that very directly in your film, does she not?
EM: She does indeed.
JO: It’s the smiles in the photographs that allows her and the other soldiers to seem celebratory, and that becomes then the lynchpin of the government’s bad apple argument, which is essentially a denial of what was standard operating procedure. And then the smile – you wrote about it once, you were so fascinated by it that you analysed whether the smile was in fact a genuine smile. But the other question, the other fascinating thing, is if Graner and the others were with her on this, that’s one thing, but her smile may have been directed more towards her colleagues at the time, and the photographs may not have been intended as memorabilia at all, but rather as a kind of, as she says, as a way of exposing what they were being asked to do.
EM: Or both! The two are not mutually exclusive.
JO: In a way her smile must have been genuine at moments. As you know, I’ve spent the past few years filming seemingly unrepentant and boastful death squad leaders, corrupt men in positions of great power. I have won their confidence and let them tell their stories, suspending at times my own judgements in order to help them dramatise their memories of killing, as well as their fears of revenge, their nightmares – whatever traces I could find of a conscience. I became very close to them throughout the process, and it’s that closeness that the audience must feel, too. I would smile with them, laugh with them, and although I never lost sight, I think, of the moral purpose to which this work was put, the goal of exposé – not merely of the crime itself but of the nature of the regime and society and particular forms of evil built upon that crime – I certainly experienced moments of genuine pleasure with these men. In a way, this even was a way of protecting myself – as it may have been for them, too – from the worst of the horrors being described, or in Sabrina’s case, being photographed.
EM: What you’re saying, I believe is correct.
JO: And here I’d like to come back to Sontag. I think that whatever Sabrina’s intention or feelings, Sontag’s conclusions remain totally relevant. Fundamentally, Sontag argued that this celebratory staging of snapshots to be browsed through fondly again and again betrays an amorality and alienation in the broader culture. Even if the photographs may be, as I think your film reveals, artefacts of Sabrina Harman’s effort at exposé, an act of disobedience, the mere fact that Sabrina might imagine her gloating smile and ‘thumbs up’ to be a plausible cover for her undercover project reveals something very nasty indeed about the culture of the guards at Abu Ghraib. And that in turn reveals something even more frightening about our society as well – the same frightful thing, I think, that motivated Sontag’s essay. That is, whether or not the celebration is genuine, whether or not Sabrina’s smile is sincere, the very thing Sontag laments in her essay is indeed apparent in the photographs: namely that we inhabit and are products of a culture in which such photographs are plausible mnemonics for happy memories.
EM: The intention behind Sabrina’s smile is a red herring, and it’s a red herring because what we’re trying to say here is not whether or not she was enjoying herself – say she was, for the sake of argument, enjoying herself – isn’t the issue still, ‘Who killed the guy? Who was responsible for this man’s death? Who, and if it was a murder, who was the murderer?’ That’s the issue. The photograph, of course, provides no context. The photograph tells you nothing about what happened before or after … there’s just a group of photographs.
And one of the things that I became obsessed with is the question of whether one can read the intention of the photographer from the photograph and, by extension, can one read the intentions of the people who were in the photograph from the photograph itself?
Because the Abu Ghraib photographs are digital, they have these hidden files, EXIS files, that contain all this information. We can take all the photographs of Al Jamadi that night in the shower room, including the two trips to the shower room that Sabrina made, one with Chip Frederick, one with Chuck Graner, and we can order the photographs within a fraction of a second. It’s a straightforward process, and one of the things that I noticed about the photographs is that, if you have a pile of photographs on a desk in front of you, you can order them, and you can tell which camera took which photograph – there were three cameras involved – and you can, on the basis of that order, try to imagine certain things about the nature of what the people were thinking. Now, could I be wrong about it? Absolutely, I could be wrong. But I am taking my inferences about what they were thinking, not from some imagined order, but from real order that is represented by those hidden digital files that are extracted, the EXIS files. And it’s interesting to note that the first photographs are of Sabrina with her thumb in the air, followed by a photograph of Chuck Graner with his thumb in the air. You can imagine them joking. It has the feeling of, you know, we’re in the shower room with a corpse, let’s take this picture. Over the course of the night, the photographs change, and they change from these wider shots to more and more specific shots, until the last shot was taken of Al Jamadi’s eye with the band aid pulled off of his eye. Now, I interviewed Sabrina at length about these photographs. I couldn’t interview Frederick, he was in prison, and he still will not talk to me, and Graner is in prison and can’t talk to me. But I interviewed Sabrina, and her view was that they went in there, and she gradually became more and more interested in the corpse, in the sense of a forensic interest, that she suspected that a crime had been committed – she had been told by her commanding officer that this guy had died of a heart attack. And Sabrina said, ‘If you took one look at him you knew that this was a lie. This man had not died of a heart attack, this man had been horribly, horribly, horribly beaten; maybe he suffered a heart attack as a result of being beaten, but he had been horribly beaten.’ And she took these photographs, the last photograph is the photograph of the eye, and what is so interesting is – this doesn’t come up in any of the statements – Sabrina’s explanation for this is that the C.I.D. Interrogators wanted to stay as far away from this as they possibly could. And so initially she had been charged with tampering with evidence – by removing the bandage. And she jokes in the movie, she said, ‘They put the bandage on his eye so that they could tamper with evidence! … So I was being accused of tampering with evidence that they had already tampered with.’
JO: Tampering with the tampering.
EM: By un-tampering it, or whatever! And she is amused by that fact. Yeah, what a tortured, tangled, screwed-up story.
JO: The irony there of course is that she was, in fact, tampering with evidence – evidence of the thing that the film, and a closer look at the photographs, starts to reveal – which was that there was something much more systematic which was going on that was actually terrifying. And it sort of implicates all of us in a very different way. This is what was going on between those frames. This raises two very interesting questions. One is about the scope of your film, because just as the film is kind of a critique of, or kind of an exploration of, the limits to any single photograph in any single photo album, at the same time you’ve very rigorously limited the scope of your film to those same people who, you are, pointing out, won’t supply the smoking gun. And I actually think that’s a kind of brilliant turn in the film, and I wonder if you could talk about that.
EM: Well, it might not have been a brilliant turn, I’ll never know really. But many of the other Iraq documentaries took a completely uncritical look at the photographs. Those filmmakers were interested in simply decrying the policies of the Bush administration so just took an uncritical look at all of these kinds of things; they were just simply illustrations of torturing, nothing more. And the fact that I was willing to look at these photographs in a different way – some people suggested that I was an apologist for torture, or I approved of the policies of the Bush administration, which is just crazy talk.
JO: But yes, if you look at the photographs simply as a documentation of torture, then they must be seen for what they appear to be, which is on the surface, at first glance, as Susan Sontag wrote, these celebratory memorabilia, and doesn’t that feed into the whole ‘bad apple’ denial, which then allowed the scope of the investigations to be limited?
EM: At its heart, Abu Ghraib is a story about photographs, misdirection and war crimes. But it’s a different story than people really want to see. It’s complex, and it’s nuanced. The movie was longer at one point, and had many more photographs, and maybe I wish that I had left it that way. I cut it because, you know, movies, if they get to be too long, no one’s going to go see them. There’s always the hope that people will actually see them. The other interesting phenomenon I wanted to talk about is Zimbardo, who became entangled in all of the defense arguments, or many of the defense arguments made on behalf of the bad apples. And one of the things I find really deeply uninteresting are attempts to link Abu Ghraib with the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment. I find it to be really, really close to nonsense, for a number of reasons.
To start with, Milgram’s experiments were done with civilians in New Haven, Connecticut, in a very controlled laboratory situation. The Stanford prison experiment was done with members of the Stanford community at Palo Alto. Some students, some just local citizens. You don’t use an experiment like that to show why people obey authority in the military. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the entire military is based on obedience – it’s given, it’s part of what you’re trained to do! So having to bring up some of social science experiment in order to explain why people follow orders in the military … that’s really stupid. And yet no one seems to ever say this. And yet I see it again and again and again. But what is interesting is that the taking of the photographs, and I will say this, I believe this is true in many instances, by Chuck Graner, and by Sabrina Harman, was
disobedience to authority, not obedience to authority. The photography was an act of freedom and disobedience.
JO: Disobedience under the cover of a smile and a thumbs up.
EM: People think they need to explain these people, because everyone assumes they’re bad. Doesn’t matter whether you’re left or you’re right, they’re bad, bad, bad, bad. If you’re on the right, you think that they’re bad in and of themselves. Self-directed, evil incarnate.
If you’re on the left, you think they’re bad, just as bad as the people on the right think, but you think that their badness was engendered by the evil Troika of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush. And no one ever considers the fact that they might not be totally evil, that they might be people like you and me, with complex emotions and reasons, and that these social science experiments, far from explaining any of it, obscure it, just in the same way that the photographs obscure looking more deeply into what happened there, and the motivations of these soldiers.
JO: I kind of constructed the story of the MPs in my head from the photographs and video you gave to me. I had this image that Sabrina Harman was trying to do something good, at least certainly partially good, that she was essentially a whistle-blower. I kind of perceived her as a sort of taker of snapshots, of souvenir photos, of torture, but I interpreted that as sort of a cover, as if she was almost, kind of, infiltrating these moments and I took the fact that that might be a workable cover for a whistle-blower to speak volumes about this sort of amorality of the entire workplace. The amorality of something large and systemic. But I didn’t see Graner that way, maybe because I’ve not met him and we didn’t see him in the film… But, I definitely didn’t see Sabrina as bad after the film, I saw her as terribly, terribly wronged and hung out to dry. Perhaps I too am too eager to make sense of things by telling myself a simplistic, Manichean story.
EM: About Graner, I’ve never been able to speak to, so I sort of remain agnostic. I think that there were monstrous aspects of his behavior, but again, you know, I would love to talk to all of these people, obviously I’ve invested a lot of time in thinking about the whole story. I mean, it’s interesting that in order to deal with history, and it probably goes well beyond photography, we have to de-contextualise it, we have to simplify it, we have to put it into some narrative form where we can understand it, because the complexities of history are just unfathomable otherwise. McNamara is yet another perfect example. You can’t really talk about him without people accusing you – and you in this particular instance means me – accusing me of being an apologist for a war criminal, for letting him off the hook, excusing his behavior, etc. I mean, often we don’t want explanations because we want to condemn, we don’t want to excuse. We don’t want to see a story as being grey. We want to see it as being black and white; we prefer to leave it that way, because it offers answers to our social concerns. And history, of course, falls victim to that kind of thinking, history becomes a kind of cartoon, a gross simplification of what is really happening, or what really happened. And photography helps us to simplify, and to lie to ourselves about the world.
JO: Do you think that there’s something in what you were saying also about understanding, and the role of empathy, trying to understand the way people make choices and to get into their heads? Certainly one thing that you do is you bring us incredibly close to the characters. I saw Standard Operating Procedure in a very big cinema, and as is my habit, I sat in the front row.
EM: That is overwhelming.
JO: Well especially Lynndie England, with those jawbones that she has…
EM: I saw it at the Berlinale in 2008. And it was in this theatre, and Lynndie England seemed like she was forty feet high. I felt like screaming, I felt like crawling under the seat and hiding. It was so oppressive. It was so much of the stuff of nightmare. I thought, ‘what the hell were you thinking?’
JO: To bring us so close to these faces seems to be almost like an expression, and effort, almost like an antidote to seeing Lynndie England in all these photographs. Here we’re forced to see her and encounter her in a completely different way. Maybe it felt oppressive to you, but it certainly breaks through all the preconceptions we have about her. These close-ups not only make Lynndie England strange. They make her human, almost mythically so. The ‘bad apple’ narrative tries to cast her as a monster, qualitatively different from the rest of us, but of course there are no real monsters in life. You introduce us to the characters already at the size we expect to meet them – huge, looming over the whole case, without ‘humanising’ them in the false and cliché way that a medium-shot would. Is it possible that these close-ups do both of these contradictory things at same time? Perhaps it’s the contradiction itself that disorients us, and opens us up to reinterpreting the whole story, which is what the film’s really trying to do.
EM: Yes, it is. I think that they’re all really, really interesting characters, and you know the job of documentary, if there is a job, the job as I see it is to capture; you can’t ever be successful at doing this, so the futility of the attempt is also of interest, but it’s to try to the best of your abilities to capture the complexity of reality. Of incorporating something of the real world, and its complexity, that informs the story. And if you do that, that’s a noble enterprise. Simplifying things crudely to some ordinary kind of narrative doesn’t particularly interest me, because then it doesn’t really do anything different than the expected. Particularly with the narratives that spill out, or the expected narratives, the thought after narratives, the narratives that will be the least controversial, and the most easily taken in. You know one of the amazing things about Abu Ghraib is that not only did we have to identify the villains, and again, this is true of those on the political left and the right, is we have to identify villains. We also have to identify heroes.
And Zimbardo, in his book
The Lucifer Effect2 spends an inordinate number of pages on what it considers to be the flipside: how we need not just to explain villains using the Stanford prison experiment, we also need to explain heroes as well, and then he takes as the central hero of Abu Ghraib, Joseph Darby. Now, I took Darby out to the movies, and I did it for a whole number of reasons; I had this extraordinary number of interviews with Darby, I could go on and on and on, I could make a film about Darby. But to me, Darby is no hero. I truly believe that Sabrina Harman is no villain; I would say that Darby is closer to a villain. And so it becomes odd, this need to project, and this Manichean worldview, onto this set of images. Who is Darby? Darby is the guy who turned the images into C.I.D. Now many people think that Darby is responsible for these images getting to Sy Hersh, and to
Sixty Minutes. Well, wrong. All the army did with those images was suppress them. They had no interest in making them public. Sy Hersh and
Sixty Minutes got them from a completely different source. That’s one of the ironies that no one knows about. And, supposedly Rumsfeld outed Darby by accident. He didn’t out him by accident; that was no accident, it was because he needed a hero, we needed a hero from Abu Ghraib, the guy had the courage to go to his commanding officers and tell them that this stuff was going on.
You know, I went with Robert S. McNamara to the international criminal court in The Hague, and we showed the movie The Fog of War [2003] to the International Court – I was there with Samantha Power and Robert McNamara. And McNamara went in and talked to one of the officials of the court and they were talking about current statues about war crimes, and McNamara said something to the effect, ‘Well I wish those kinds of statutes had been in place when I was Secretary of Defense.’ And the guy looked at him and said, ‘But Sir, they were.’ And it was such a surreal moment.