I am not someone who is familiar and knows the ins and outs of what has gone on with the war on terror. I obviously have heard of what’s going on, read the news and so on, but I haven’t gone any further to find out more information. The incidents this film tackles and explores are vaguely familiar to me but I in no way knew anything in-depth about them. Whether it's the nature of the incidents themselves or how the film presents them — I was shocked.
The documentary investigates and explores the accusations against U.S. soldiers regarding their mistreatment of suspected terrorists in Abu Ghraib, evidenced by thousands of photographs that were released.
Standard Operating Procedure is a film that I think must be seen. To my knowledge it is the first documentary to tackle the incidents at Abu Ghraib and the photos that were released, and if nothing else it acts, as many documentaries do, as a source of information. It’s not always an easy watch by any means, in fact some of it is extremely discomforting, but try and persevere through the difficult parts and I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.
What makes the film so shocking — at times so much so that it’s jaw-dropping — is the fact that it’s based on fact. Not that the entire film is completely 100% the truth, as part of the filmmaking technique is to depict described incidents via re-enactments, but it’s far too in-depth and savvy about what happened for it to be made up. As someone from the West the news would have us believe that the Iraqis are completely the bad guys in this current war and that the US are all good and only want positive things to happen. And it deeply shocked me to see evidence in this film that they are doing wrong things too, they’re not always the “good guys”. The point, or at least one of them, that the film makes is that if someone were to tell you that certain US soldiers treated Iraqi prisoners badly then you could make up your own mind whether or not it’s true but if someone shows you physical evidence, in this case a photograph, then there’s simply no denying it.
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