Entertainment

The photograph is deeply troubling in any context. A dead man lies in an unzipped bag, his body covered in ice. A young woman wearing mint-green gloves kneels at his side, flashing a toothy smile and a thumbs-up sign. To many this was the most shocking image to emerge from Abu Ghraib, more disturbing than the naked human pyramid or the contorted prisoner with panties over his head.

Errol Morris, the philosopher king of documentary filmmakers and the director of the new Standard Operating Procedure , was among the dismayed. "I remember seeing the photograph for the first time and thinking, 'This is monstrous,' " he says during a recent stop in Dallas.

Then, as he is wont to do, he probed deeper. And deeper. He accumulated millions of words of interview transcripts. Trial transcripts. Government documents. And, of course, photos, some 270 of them.

His conclusion? "As I went deeper and deeper into this it became very, very, very hard for me not to feel these people were scapegoats," he says of the MPs punished in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib. "And there are certain things that pushed me over the edge, including the picture of Sabrina Harman with her thumbs up with the corpse."

Standard Operating Procedure, the third and most haunting documentary to tackle Abu Ghraib (after Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side), is concerned with all of the photos, what they reveal and what they conceal. But Ms. Harman, a specialist with the 372nd MP Company who was sentenced to six months in prison for her role in the scandal, holds a particular fascination for Mr. Morris.

He posted an epic-length and carefully footnoted entry about the Harman photo on his New York Times photography blog, Zoom ( morris.blogs.nytimes.com). The photo is the primary subject of the Standard Operating Procedure book excerpt (written with Philip Gourevitch) published in The New Yorker. An astute chronicler of obsession, Mr. Morris is no stranger to the condition. "In a way the whole story is summed up in that one photograph," he says. "It touches on everything."

This is the kind of puzzle in which Mr. Morris, 60, specializes: a film about photos that concentrates on what lies outside the frame. On his blog, Mr. Morris offers evidence that the dead man in the photo, Manadel al-Jamadi, was killed and savagely beaten by a CIA interrogator (as previously reported by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker). Ms. Harman's commanding officer, Capt. Christopher Brinson, then said at the time that Mr. al-Jamadi died of a heart attack.

The infamous Harman photo was taken by a fellow MP, Charles Graner. Ms. Harman took one look at the corpse's battered face and figured this was no heart attack victim (a suspicion later confirmed by an armed forces medical examiner, who called the death a homicide). Then she came back and took forensic photos of the corpse before it was taken out on a gurney with an IV in its arm to prevent a prison riot.

"That's the cover-up," Mr. Morris says. "Taking this guy out on a gurney with an IV in his arm? Pretending he's a heart attack victim? That's covering up a serious felony. In all likelihood it's covering up a murder. But who gets punished? The people involved with the cover-up? No. The guy who killed al-Jamadi? Uh-uh. Sabrina Harman, for taking pictures? Prison."

Mr. Morris shakes his head, then unleashes another torrent of questions.

"I ask people, what exactly did Sabrina do? Is her crime photography? That's what it seems like. It's a crime to take a picture of a crime, but the crime itself goes unpunished. Is that the idea? Is the idea that you can't embarrass the military, you can't embarrass the administration? Everything else is OK? Is that the message?"

None of which quite explains the thumbs-up gesture, which Ms. Harman addresses in the film. She says she picked it up from Iraqi kids when she was stationed in Al Hillah, and that she adopted the pose for every photo in which she appeared. (Mr. Morris says he has seen 20 photos of Ms. Harman making the exact same gesture.) "It's just something that automatically happens," she says in the film and on the Zoom blog. "Like when you get into a photo you want to smile. It's just, I guess, something I did."

Mr. Morris is still troubled by the photos. But he's also adamant that they're just a starting point for looking at what happened at Abu Ghraib.

"I don't want to make the claim that these guys are lily-white, because I just don't think it's true," he continues. "I don't think they're pure victims, and I don't want to leave you with that impression. But I do think they're so low down on the totem pole compared to the people who I believe are so much more directly responsible that, for all intents and purposes, this amounts to a terrible miscarriage of justice."

Not familiar with Errol Morris? Here are some essential titles from the documentary maestro:

•Gates of Heaven (1978): Mr. Morris establishes himself as a student of the human condition with this look at a California pet cemetery.

•The Thin Blue Line (1988): Errol does Dallas and gets an innocent man off death row in this artful investigation, scored by Philip Glass.

•Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997): Mole rats meet topiary sculpture in this look at folks who carry unusual passions to the extreme.

•Mr. Death (1999): A see-it-to-believe-it profile of an execution expert turned neo-Nazi dupe.

•The Fog of War (2003): Oscar-winning portrait of the embattled Vietnam War architect Robert S. McNamara.

Chris Vognar