Lynndie England in Standard Operating Procedure Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

Drawing on his background as a private investigator, the filmmaker began an exhaustive search of the photographs and paper trail surrounding the events and the resulting trials. As he sifted the archival evidence, he began to make contacts among the soldiers appearing in the photographs — Sabrina Harman, Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England, Charles "Chip" Graner, Ivan Frederick, Jeremy Sivits and Javal Davis — the seven MPs Donald Rumsfeld described as "bad apples" as the Army attempted to control public perception of the images. These low-ranking soldiers were reluctant to talk at first, Morris recalls: "Of course it took some convincing, it's one of the hardest things I've ever done. No one wanted to do it; all these people are angry, they're bitter, many of them had just gotten out of prison; their lives had been utterly destroyed. They needed to make money to find jobs. Many of them had enormous difficulty finding jobs, they found that the jobs they had going into the military had been lost and they could not go back, all of that. It became really, really difficult. The level of paranoia — justified paranoia — and suspicion is so great...I think that they were hopeful that I would tell their stories, I don't know if they trusted me, I don't know if they really trust anybody at this point." One by one he was able to secure interviews, with the exception of Graner and Frederick, who remained in military prison at the time of the filming.

Megan Ambuhl in Standard Operating Procedure Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The results of these interviews are surprising. Morris comes from the "give 'em enough rope" school of interviewing — his sessions with film subjects run for hours on end, sometimes days, and his voice is rarely heard interrupting his subjects' monologues. His skillful empathy and curiosity as a listener are augmented by the "interrotron," a system he devised that adapts teleprompter technology so that his subjects seem to be looking directly into the lens of the camera during interviews, while they are responding to a live image of Morris's face superimposed in front of the lens. The participants are revealed as young, scared, far from home, cowed by authority, and, in the cases of Lynndie England and Megan Ambuhl, blinded by love for Charles Graner, the apparent ringleader of the cruel circus on tier 1A, by whom England has a son and to whom Ambuhl is now married. England, her wrenched face and twitching eyelid framed in tight closeup, describes her powerlessness in moving soliloquies. Graner comes across as full of sinister charisma, coercing the women to pose with naked prisoners and flashing a goofy frat boy grin in archetypal images of military hypermasculinity and homoeroticism. Morris manages to humanize these young soldiers who had been so demonized and scapegoated by the Pentagon's orchestrated PR blitz as the story first broke in the media, but doesn't manage to pull off the more difficult feat of humanizing their victims, whose experiences remain opaque.

It becomes powerfully clear through the interviews that among the things concealed by the photographs are the circumstances under which they were taken, as well as the intentions of the participants themselves. A powerful image in the film shows the one cellblock where the photos were taken as but a corner of Saddam's flagship prison complex, itself only one among dozens of prisons and detention sites maintained around the country. "There's an important thing about photography. We look at a photograph and we think we know what it's about, what's in it. We think we understand it, we believe what we see. There's a quote form Mark Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy, King Leopold [the Belgian ruler responsible for the deaths of some 10 million Congolese in his Imperialist efforts and its subsequent coverup] says, 'Ah! The Kodak. The only witness I have been unable to bribe.' There is that general notion that there is something truthful about photography. I would respectfully disagree. I would say that photography provides evidence, it doesn't provide truth. It provides evidence that we have to go back and examine, that we have think about, that we have to try to understand. We can misinterpret photographs in a myriad of different ways. And these photographs in particular have been misunderstood, terribly misunderstood. [Writer of Standard Operating Procedure's accompanying book] Philip Gourevitch's line is that a photograph can be both an exposé and a coverup. I have simplified it I think to something maybe a little more catchy: Photographs reveal and conceal."

Sabrina Harman in Standard Operating Procedure Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

"The other problem [with photography's claim to represent truth] is that photographs are ripped out of reality. They're decontextualized. You don't know really what the meaning of what you're looking at might be." He refers to the photograph of Sabrina Harman giving a thumbs up in front of the brutalized, decaying face of Manadel al-Jamadi: "I looked at the photograph [for the first time] and I thought 'Good grief! This is really sick, this is really, really fucked up.' I also thought: 'She's complicit.' It almost seemed like she was gloating over a murder that she had just committed. It's monstrous. Well, fast forward years later: I know a lot about that photograph, I've interviewed Sabrina at length, I've read all of her letters again and again, and thought about them. And I've also investigated the circumstances of al-Jamadi's death, I've read an enormous quantity of material and I've interviewed over a dozen people in connection with that incident. Sabrina Harman had nothing to do with the death of al-Jamadi, nothing whatsoever. al-Jamadi was killed by a CIA operative — I know his name. Immediately after they realized that he was dead, major officers in the chain of command at Abu Ghraib arranged a cover-up. Sabrina Harman had nothing to do with the cover-up. She was told by her commanding officer that this was a heart attack victim. She gets a key, she goes into the shower room, and they take a whole mess of pictures. Sabrina wanted to be a forensic photographer. Her father is a cop, her brother is a cop. She joined the army because she wanted to get money for school and go into forensic photography. Sabrina takes some photographs and then she comes back and takes what can only be considered a set of extensive forensic photographs of al-Jamadi's body. The last photograph she takes, she peels the bandage off of his face and takes a close-up of the injuries to his eye. This photograph comes out [in the media] very soon after. Everybody thinks they understand it. No one understands it, No one knows what they're looking at. The photograph reveals a crime, but it also conceals the crime and misdirects our attention to the wrong person as the culprit. Simple as that. And that's kind of scary, and horrifying, and disturbing in and of itself."