Erroll Morris Discusses 'Standard Operating Procedure'

Filmmaker Errol Morris will be online Monday, April 14 at noon ET to discuss his new documentary, "Standard Operating Procedure," which examines the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

A transcript follows.

Morris directed the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War," " Fast, Cheap and Out of Control," "The Thin Blue Line" and other noted documentaries.

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Mt. Lebanon Pa.: Just by accident without knowing who you are/what you've been doing, I watched" The Fog of War" this weekend. I had been avoiding reading or seeing anything about McNamara. As a draftee during Vietnam (but not directly in the war), I've been pretty well fed up with "The Best and the Brightest" since my days in the service.

Any parallels between the Harvard plutocrat know-it-alls who manufactured that conflict (Bundy brothers, McNamara, Rusk, Harriman) and their Neocon band of brothers who gave us Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo?

Is America condemned to be led by entrail diviners and star gazers who never read let alone understood anything written by W. Shakespeare?

I'm past tired of repeating history and being disgraced by amoral automatons posing as men and women of learning.

Thanks much.

Errol Morris: When Donald Rumsfeld left office, I got all of these calls, including one from the Post, asking me to compare Rumsfeld and McNamara. Both Sec. of Defense, took office exactly 40 years apart. McNamara in Jan. 1961, Rumsfeld in 2001. Maybe they look a bit alike, but other than that, you're talking about two very different people and two very different situations.

Let me give you an example -- in w 1961, when McNamara became secretary, we're talking about a bellicose Joint Chiefs that wanted a war with the Soviet Union. There was the possibility a strike could end everything once and for all. Kennedy and McNamara's job was to avoid nuclear war. This is at the height of Berlin and the Cuban Missle Crisis. There was the very real possibility we could be in a nuclear conflict. McNamara, I think, played a very significant role in preventing that. Yes, he helped escalate the Vietnam war, but he kept it from spilling over to World War III.

When Rumsfeld took office, it was the exact opposite. The Joint Chiefs were doves, interested in avoiding war, not creating. But the administration was very much interested in confrontation. It was the exact opposite of 40 years previously. That is a major difference between Rumsfeld and McNamara.

We lose sight of it because we think of Vietnam as an unnecessary, senseless war, and I agree. But at the time, people really, really, really believed it had to be fought. Maybe that is the same as today. In retrospect, we see these wars as unnecessary. We don't have time to look back at it. But history will ask why this war was fought in the first place.

Those who are not familiar with history are destined to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

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Boston: Is there any reason why we aren't hearing calls for an independent prosecutor to examine how many unprincipled principals put into motion so many unconstitutional actions over the past few years?

Has there ever been anything more embarrassing than the sight of the President of the United States casually telling a reporter that he ordered what any 8th grade U.S. Civics class would understand to be reprehensible and un-American?

Errol Morris: Pretty damn embarrassing. I look at the 80-page memo that was recently released to the ACLU, 80-pages of dense legalese, you get to the end, and you're told "The president can do whatever he wants to do." He doesn't have to follow international treaties, he doesn't have to be bound by the judiciary or the legislative branches of government. He can do what he damn well pleases.

Of course, the flip side, if he can do whatever he chooses to do, that means he is accountable for everything he does, and should be held responsible. For me, one of the big questions people have to ask, is why have we failed to impeach?

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Munich, Germany: Where did people like Lynndie England get their ideas to punish and humiliate the prisoners at Abu Ghraib? Was it like a free-for-all, brainstorming process where people like Ms. England came up independently with these ideas, or was there a media source, a novel or film, or was there a person of authority with some knowledge of past techniques? I can't imagine that an ordinary person would get the idea to order naked men to form a pyramid without some sort of external stimuli.

Errol Morris: I imagine you have not seen my film "Standard Operating Procedure" yet, I know it will be released in Germany soon. One of the stories in the film, how these soldiers arrived at Abu Ghraib in 2003, they walked into this cell block, and there were prisoners naked with panties on their head, tied up like pretzels, deprived of sleep -- all of this was in place when they got there. In those photographs, we're looking at policy.

It's become so endlessly politicized, the left says this, the right says that, what I've done is to try and talk to the soldiers who worked in that prison. I've interviewed the prosecution witness for the govt., who himself tells us that many of the most awful pictures are standard operating procedure.

The policy of sexual humiliation, of stripping prisoners, of putting panties on their heads, all of that comes from military and CIA sources.

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Lyme, CT.: When President Johnson decided to escalate the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, there were people within the State Department who strongly advised him against doing so. Supposedly there were also people within the State Department who strongly advised President Bush not to go to war in Iraq. Have you examined these voices and why they failed to be heard?

Errol Morris: The answer of why we get into war is such an endlessly complicated one. If one wants to find evidence for anything, you can manufacture it, you can come to believe it, you can exclude the things you don't want to see and make up the things you do want to see. That's an unfortunate reality of human behavior. We can believe what we want, no matter what the evidence is to the contrary. And one of the most frightening consequences is it makes up very susceptible to war.

There's a line at the end of Fog of War, for me the saddest line in the whole movie. McNamara, a man who has based his entire life on the belief that you can think through problems, that they have rational solutions, at the very end of the movie, he says "perhaps rationality is not enough." That somehow we are doomed by ourselves to an endless cycle of war. And that's a deeply disturbing, very frightening thought.

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America: Good luck with your film.

I'm sure as many people will see it as saw all of the other anti-American movies about how evil we were to overthrow a horrendous dictator who oppressed his own people, worked hand in hand with terrorists to fight freedom, and attacked our allies.

Errol Morris: This is not, this may seem like an amazing claim, or a claim that is untrue, but I don't see this movie as a political movie. It's not about the higher ups in the current administration. It's the flipside of Fog of War -- I'm looking at the people at the bottom of the chain of command, not at the top. I think it's a very powerful story about people, people who have been described as monsters but who never got to tell their side of a story.

It's also a movie about photographs, how they can reveal and conceal. And I think there's a lot of new information here people will find of interest. I think it's a good movie.

Remember, no one has talked to these people. Everyone has seen these photographs, but noone knows who took them, or why. It's a mystery, and I try to go into the mystery. So much of the war is about politics, and I like to think I've done something very different here.

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West Los Angeles, CA: I'm curious why more Generals haven't stood up to Bush and resigned rather than leaking to the Press anonymously that the US Military is under strain. Do most Pentagon Generals support what Bush/Cheney did (i.e., dispatched the US Military to fight a 5+year ground war in the Arabian Desert for what proved to be dubious reasons without exit strategy), are the Generals too embarrassed about supporting Bush's invasion initially given the results or does protecting their pay & pension benefits override legitimate concerns about US security and Military readiness? Is there any doubt that Pentagon Generals wouldn't be as passive (i.e., only leaking anonymously) if a Democrat President ordered the Iraq invasion and achieved similar results as Bush? What is your take?

Errol Morris: That's a question I can't really answer. I haven't spoken to that many generals. I think it's important to remember though that this is the military. There's a chain of command, with the president as commander in chief. Your question is why haven't they simply resigned? It's a hard think to do. I wish the military was more vocal, because I truly believe the problem isn't with the military, but how the military has been used. I think that's one of the most devastating things about this war, that we sent a military that was undertrained, underequipped and understaffed. Most of the people in the military I've talked to know full well tha twas the case.

Janice Karpinski, a general demoted by Bush to colonel, was given the task of rebuilding the entire Iraqi prison system. In the fall of 2002, Sadaam let everyone out of the prison system. By 2003, there was no prison system left. Karpinski was given the task of creating something out of nothing, in the middle of chaos.

This isn't just her story, but the story of many, many people in the military. I'm surprised that people are surprised by the power of the chain of command. It's the military -- you follow the orders of your superior officers. I was curious about these common soldiers, why they did what they did. What was going on inside their heads, didn't they think about right and wrong? I suppose the simple way of putting it is "What were they thinking?" And it's really interesting how many of these soldiers knew what they were doing was wrong, had moral questions, but they would watch their commanding officers doing things, they would object, and they were told "not your lane, not your business." One thing people don't understand is that the pictures, in part, were an act of disobedience, and soldiers took the pictures because they believed it would provide evidence. I find it ironic those pictures taken to protect themselves helped land them in prison. The story is one of scapegoats -- blame the little guys and the rest of us don't have to deal with it. And to me, that's the most un-American thing. I have this populist, maybe outdated, idea about America. You don't beat up on the little guys and then watch the big guys pin medals on each other.

It's been absolutely terrific answering your questions, thank you very much.

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