Errol Morris is best known as a documentarian, but his reach and vision have pushed him well past such simplistic categorization.

Underrated writer/director Joe Carnahan gave credit to Morris for shots in Narc. Try to watch a blood-splattered, traveling-through-the-intestines, bullet-time CSI sequence without thinking back to scenes in The Thin Blue Line (which was directed by Morris). In his life, Morris has been a musician, a philosopher, a film student, and always a rule breaker. He is an unrepentant intellectual, which is something to be proud of, regardless of the misappropriation of the term by today's news media.

Of his many films, Gates of Heaven is on critic Roger Ebert's top-10 greatest films list. I return repeatedly to Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control for inspiration as an upbeat view into the heart of humanity's passion and ingenuity, and Morris was finally awarded an Oscar for The Fog of War. Recently, I was lucky enough to speak with Morris during his publicity tour for his latest film, SOP: Standard Operating Procedure, which digs into the Abu Ghraib scandal in an attempt to make sense of the prisoner abuse and subsequent cover-up. He gives voice to the American personnel involved and ultimately uncovers a murder that has been buried by the government.

When Errol Morris walked into the room he was energized and joking with his producer about the insanity of the situation he's found himself embroiled in. He seemed full of an angry and rebellious spirit. During the initial introduction his thoughts were turning on the theory that a love triangle can destroy the world, that the triangle of Lynndie England, Charles Graner, and Megan Ambuhl (three of the five U.S. military personnel charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal) could be seen as a direct reflection, even a re-enactment of U.S. foreign policies. With that as a starting gun, I sat down and held on (seriously) as he made clear his views on the current administration and defended and defined his film, SOP: Standard Operating Procedure and how he views the war itself.

MORRIS: My two cents worth of opinion is that this is not just a war of humiliation but a war of sexual humiliation at its core, and the entire foreign policy. I wouldn't even think it's fair to say that America has a foreign policy in the years since 9/11, but if it has had a foreign policy, the foreign policy is, show them whose boss, humiliate them like they have humiliated us. "Shock and Awe" is about humiliation. It's about showing someone you're more powerful than they are. You can fuck with them; you can do anything you want to them. Why no thought about the aftermath of "Shock and Awe?" Because who cares about the aftermath? It's about the humiliation; there is no point beyond that.

You have policies, it's no accident you have policies. You have women in the military now more so than in any other war in American history. So how do we use women? How does the military use women? Okay, we'll turn them into either damsels in distress, a la Jessica Lynch - - it's all atavistic in some way - - or we'll turn them into these monsters. In the end of my 17 hours with Janis Karpinski, she started to compare herself to Lynndie England ... she said, 'They needed a flip side to women in the army, a flip side to Jessica Lynch and it was Lynndie England and it was me.'

CD: in what manner was she the flip side?

MORRIS: Jessica Lynch: good. Lynndie England, Janis Karpinski: bad, not good.

CD: How is the military comparing them?

MORRIS: How we are all portraying them, not just the military. Yeah, it becomes part of the zeitgeist. Lynndie England is the monster, the monstrous girl from Abu Ghraib. You use American women to strip Iraqi males because studies have shown that Iraqi males find this particularly humiliating.

CD: Right, right.

MORRIS: Tim Dugan walks into Abu Ghraib. First interrogation they have [is with] a prisoner known as The Wolf. The two female interrogators have stripped him nude, and Dugan asks his superiors, "You know .. are they supposed to do that? Are we supposed to do that?" He is told, "They can do it, but you can't."

CD: And these are the people that came up from Guantanamo Bay if I'm not mistaken.

MORRIS: People love to focus on Jeffrey Miller and the fact that Jeffrey Miller was brought from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib. He instituted policies that were in place in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but he is just one piece in a multi-pieced jigsaw puzzle. The prison, which was huge, close to 10k prisoners near the end of December of 2003 ... and the intelligence hub [which] is called the JIDC, the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center ... The JIDC is in constant contact with the Department of Defense. I know that Rumsfeld was on the phone with these people. You don't even need Jeffrey Miller to come from Guantanamo, you have a myriad of connections to the highest levels of the U.S. Government.

CD: Wasn't Rumsfeld the one that sent them? Wasn't he the one who signed a lot of the documents that say, "Move in this direction in terms of ... "

MORRIS: It's not just Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld is certainly a part of it, but you have this whole array of torture memos coming out of the highest levels of government from the OLC, from John Yoo, from Addington (Dick Cheney's lawyer), on and on and on and on and on. There is no great secret about any of this. That's what's so amazing. What's amazing to me is there's smoking guns everywhere and no one cares, the President himself can say he's involved.

CD: Right, and that he approves.

MORRIS: And no one says anything. It's just business as usual.

CD: How do you think this administration is going to be seen and documented later on, further on down the line?

MORRIS: I hope they're indicted in the short run! I can tell you how I see them. I see them as war criminals!

CD: I wonder if that's even a possibility?

MORRIS: Well, it's certainly a possibility. I mean, is there the will to indict them? Is Congress willing to impeach? Unlikely.

CD: Right. Seymour Hersh was saying he thought Abu Ghraib was certainly going to bring them down. That was enough.

MORRIS: No, nothing. Nothing seems to matter to the American public. That's really the scary part. Yes it's scary that these people have these policies, but the fact that they just are allowed to get away with it and no one says anything? That's the remarkable part of this society and I don't think it does us any good in the end.

CD: There seems to be -- and I've noticed it in more than one of your documentaries -- a visceral response even before people have seen it. Have you seen this more or less than this time than with Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.?

MORRIS: More.

CD: More so this time?

MORRIS: People seem angry in many ways by this film. They get angry at odd things; they get angry at the reenactments. God knows, I've used illustrations, reenactments, whatever you want to call it in almost every movie I've ever made. I was going to write an article talking about how I first used it in The Thin Blue Line, and then I realized, oh my god, I used it in Gates of Heaven when Danny Harberts takes his electric guitar and goes to the top of the hill and plays for all the dead pets. He's reenacting a story he told me.

CD: Oh really?

MORRIS: Well yes! I asked him to take his speaker out, put it up, and play.

CD: It's not noticed so much because it's actually him. I figured you just followed him around with a camera, right?

MORRIS: Yeah, I set it up. Absolutely. And it was inspired by something he said in an interview. As is every illustration I've ever used. Someone will say something and I will try to call attention to what they are saying and illustrate it. You know, it doesn't matter whether it's the milkshake toss in The Thin Blue Line or it's the falling skulls in The Fog of War or it's Leutcher chipping away at the brick and mortar at Krema II at Birkenau or the falling drop of blood Diaz speaks of in SOP: Standard Operating Procedure. They're not cheesy reenactments per se. They're designed to take you into the narrative.

CD: Do you think the response you're getting is more based on how much Americans, or how much the public in general -- I'm kind of hesitant to say "Americans" -- just really doesn't want to face up to the things that are happening?

MORRIS: Self-serving of me to say so, but yes. They talk about these reenactments as if there's an ethical problem? Okay, you don't like them? You don't like them! I can't make you like them! I can provide arguments for why I think I put them in the movie. Why I like them, why I use them, why I think they make sense, so on and so forth. I can also say that I'm trying to tell a story about a reality that no one really knows about. I'm trying to tell a hidden story. So I'm amazed by those criticisms, not completely amazed. I'm amazed by people saying [that] there are no new facts in this movie. It's all the same. He's just retreading stuff that other people have already talked about. Which is the flip side of, "Okay, he's telling us stuff that we've heard about from other people." The flip side is, "He should be making a movie about Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush, not about these guys. Why is he devoting all this attention and time to this small fry story about bad guys?" I don't think either is correct.

Well, it is correct that I'm devoting attention to this so-called small story, but I believe that by looking carefully at a small story like this you learn something really, really important and you learn something really big. I don't want to make another movie about Addington, Bush, Cheney and John Yoo, not that I don't think those issues are important. I think they're incredibly important, it's just that I don't want to do that, I'm sorry, so kill me! I just don't want to do it.

I think that this is more powerful and more interesting and as far as new material. I think there's new material everywhere here. I mean, one heretical thing that the movie says that I don't think any movie has come close to saying is these are all people! And here they are! Think about them as people! Look at them, listen to them!

CD: In a situation that we can't even begin to comprehend.

MORRIS: I think that's absolutely a good way of putting it. I love these discussions about what they should have done. Oh, what would you have done if you were in Lynndie England's position exactly?!

CD: In the military.

MORRIS: Or Sabrina Harman's position, exactly? Oh, they're just following orders; they're just following orders. But, it's the military.

CD: Right.

MORRIS: It's the military.

CD: The line that really stuck with me was (paraphrased from the film), "We have these guys that are coming in that are supposedly killing our own soldiers and we have our own guys coming in from across the lines having their own body parts blown off." I mean, that's an insane situation to begin with. I mean, this is war.

MORRIS: It's totally insane; they're in a free-fire zone; they're lobbing mortars into the place; people are getting killed left and right; they're understaffed, under-supplied. The prisoners are on the verge of rioting. They're outnumbered 100 to one. The guards, the IPs are Fedeyene in many instances, ready to turn around at the wrong time, kill them. One guard even smuggles a gun into one of the prisoners.

CD: Yeah, that was a photo that was surprising to me. To find out what the real story was behind that, that was very shocking.

MORRIS: I don't get it. I don't get why, because I think it's one of the better things I've done. I'm proud of the movie. I think it's visually very strong and interesting. I think it's ... yeah, I don't know what to say.

CD: Well, you've done plenty and you've done great. I was fascinated by it.

MORRIS: Well, thank you very much.

CD: I felt like it could end up becoming your Shoah, you know. You could end up doing a 20-hour movie on this and still not be done.

MORRIS: That's quite true. I have so much material. My interview with Tim Dugan is about five or six hours in length; it's one of my shorties. The whole interview is good. Dugan is just fabulous. He's this amazing character. I could make a whole movie with just Tim Dugan.

CD: Are you going to re-edit it once. Who is it that you're missing in particular, Graner?

MORRIS: Graner or Frederick? Um, I would never re-edit it because it is what it is, but I could see doing something with either Frederick or Graner or both. Or a host of other characters. I have this long interview with Lieutenant Colonel Jordan that I've never used. There's just lots and lots and lots of stuff that I have. Right now, because I am pissed off! I don't know how else to describe it. Pissed off by this idea that there's nothing new in the movie! I have been sort of devoting my attention to this New York Times essay, hopefully it will go up tomorrow, it's supposed to go up today, on Sabrina's smile. But I've done a lot of investigative work on that whole thing. I believe I know who the CIA officer was; I believe I have proof that he was in the room alone with al-Jimadi. I have really incontrovertible proof that certain people in the prison were involved in this cover-up, I know that Sabrina was not involved with it in any way shape or form and I have this story!

This has been the weirdest experience I've ever had. It really is in so many ways. I'm sure you are aware the Times did the story about my paying people. One of the things that's so strange about this for me, do I go around trying to pay people for documentaries? I don't. This deal, it was really, really simple. These people had been in prison, they were pissed off; they were desperate for money. They wouldn't have done it. They came with their lawyers, they came with their investigators, they came with family members. They just would not have agreed to do it. No one was paid but the five so-called bad apples. No one else was paid and one of the bad apples didn't want to be paid and I insisted on paying them because the others bad apples had been paid and I thought it was just not right for whatever reason. I can tell you one person who's not going to get paid in connections with this movie, by the way, me.

CD: And how is that?

MORRIS: How is that? I get a fixed amount of money to make these movies. Fog Of War: I got "x" dollars to make the movie. I went over budget by a lot of money. Who has to front that money? I have to. I am fortunate I make commercials when I'm working. I can't work while I'm promoting this movie. When I'm working I make a lot of money and I can make up for the money that I lose making documentaries.

CD: So is this a part of a multi-film agreement, this one and Fog Of War?

MORRIS: No, they're separate agreements.

CD: Same production company?

MORRIS: Yeah, I know these guys, Sony Classics, Tom Bernard and Michael Parker. I've known them for years. ... I will make nothing on this movie. I will lose money on this movie. I think it's funny; I actually think it's funny. But the New York Times reporter is after me about this question of paying people. He has the microphone in my face at the end of this Q&A deal with Anthony Swofford at the Tribeca Film Festival, which was great by the way. I'd like to get it transcribed and get it up on the Net somewhere ... and I'm talking about the Sabrina picture and how isn't it weird that the girl who appears in the picture spends a year in prison but the guy who committed the murder skates. Isn't that weird! And I mention who I think the guy is, the CIA officer .. tra-la-la, isn't this a news story?

Am I just, am I on Neptune? Is this not a news story? Someone commits a murder. Okay let's make it a little less grandiose, someone commits a possible murder. We have reason to believe that this person was involved with a murder. The wrong person has been punished. That's a story. It's a story I'm familiar with.

CD: Which journalist would print something like that? Where is it going to come out anymore? The vitriol you seem to be experiencing is coming from the same people who will attack anyone that seems to attack this administration. Do you not feel that way?

MORRIS: I don't know if it's as simple as that. I think people are so angry and disgusted, both left and right, that people don't even understand what it means to actually investigate something and look into something. It's not just all political argument, it's not all blogging. There is such a thing as digging up files, investigating, going through records and making a logical argument for why something might be the case. It's not a left-wing argument; it's not a right-wing argument; it's a rational argument, hopefully. No this has been the weirdest, I'd say the weirdest, experience, and I think it seems a lot of people would have cared if this had been a big story in the news that they were familiar with but it wasn't, it just came out of nowhere. People had forgotten about it, people didn't care about it. People deeply care about this whether they admit it or not.

And with that the interview was over.

Morris is facing an uphill battle with this film. Not only is he asking the American public to face up to the Iraqi plate of humiliation and death laid bare in front of us, but he is demanding that we respond to the proof he thinks he's found of a murder, one murder, committed by a CIA operative during a time of war. No charge has ever been brought against a CIA operative in the history of the U.S. Is this film the pebble that brings about that avalanche of prosecution? Doubtful.

But Morris is outraged and understandably so. A man has been beaten to death. The GI that documented that death was punished and imprisoned for the documentation and the men that committed that murder were allowed to walk free. It's a classic symbol of the invasion and occupation, and the frustration Morris feels toward the murder reflects our own frustration toward our elected officials. That we feel helpless or unmoved by one murder, committed in our name, is sadly understandable and all the while unacceptable, a duality Morris himself might appreciate and certainly deplore.

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