The War Comes Home

"It is very different to think about what if I was a 19-year-old there, and all the people in charge are telling me this is what to do," Musa says. For her, the potentially explosive details in the film are the questions that remain unanswered. Why was Sabrina Harman, a young soldier who is seen smiling and giving a thumbs-up over the body of a dead Iraqi prisoner, prosecuted while no one has yet been punished for killing the man in the photograph? And why was the CIA moving prisoners into Abu Ghraib "off the books," in blatant disregard of international standards of conduct in a war zone?

Morris, however, downplays the possibility of igniting new controversy.

"There are a lot of things that are explosive sound bites," he says. "But I haven't chosen to underline them as such. There is no flashing red arrow, 'Pay attention to this new piece of information.' "

Rather, he's interested in the world of information that falls outside the frames of the photographs that sparked the scandal. Throughout his film, he returns to the images -- of men strapped to bed frames, men menaced by dogs, men piled into pyramids -- to ask, almost prosaically, how did they get there? It becomes clear that many of the photographs have been misinterpreted, that not everyone captured within the frame is equally guilty and that the low-level soldiers convicted because of the photographs were simply participating in techniques and abuses that predated their arrival at Abu Ghraib.

"They didn't create this," he says, "they walked in on it. That should never, ever be forgotten."

By the end of his film, there is the framework of a powerful argument: For the Bush administration, Abu Ghraib was primarily a photographic problem, not a torture problem, or a Geneva Conventions problem, or a chain-of-command problem.

Morris compares his new film with one of his most celebrated earlier works, "The Thin Blue Line," from 1988, which helped overturn a conviction in a Texas murder case. The comparison, he says, is based on the research involved.

"When 'Thin Blue Line' came out, I would hear again and again from people that this is a movie that got a guy out of prison," he says. But, he argues, it wasn't the movie, it was the research, the documentation, the gumshoe work upon which the movie was based that made the difference. So too "Standard Operating Procedure," which avoids the confrontational, split-screen argument that could so easily be made -- that the Bush administration says it doesn't torture even as it becomes clear that torture was the de facto policy at Abu Ghraib -- in favor of reconstructing events, limning character and generally casting doubt on much of what is taken for granted about Abu Ghraib.

Often it feels as if Morris has purposely detached himself from the emotional and political fallout of the torture scandal. The documentary is a collection of footnotes, the intellectual underpinnings of an argument about the war that someone else, at some other time, will make.

Morris, Donahue and Spiro all claim that their films are not political.

"It's a story about love and hope," Spiro says. "It's a heroic journey, and those are things that have nothing to do with your political stance."

And Morris, whose camera allows the villains of Abu Ghraib to explain themselves and demonstrate conscience, has produced a film that humanizes the torturers -- which may offend and flummox viewers from across the political spectrum.

The filmmakers' claims to political neutrality will very likely be disputed, and the films will certainly be politicized. From a purely financial point of view, the makers of both documentaries may get lucky if some snippet of their work goes "viral," drawing media attention and driving people to the box office.

But five years into the war, with public opinion decidedly sour on the subject, these films may be better situated on an emotional spectrum than a political one. The war is here, its costs are increasingly apparent, a grim sense of reality is settling in. As a culture we are beginning to face the fact of the war rather as a patient faces a catastrophic illness. It is the stages of grief we're in, and Errol Morris, with his more dispassionate and nuanced film, is a little farther along than the agonized cry of Spiro and Donahue. Watch both these films, and you understand the difference between anger and denial, on the one hand, and depression and acceptance on the other.