A documentary by Errol Morris. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, May 9, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Errol Morris’s documentaries aren’t about events and ideas, they are interrogations of them. As a career approach, this has meant a curious detachment from the very things that drive him to make movies.

This can lead to a certain coolness on the part of viewers, too, although it can be argued that there’s no way to warm to material like this, which details the horrific treatment of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, part of a system of prisons including Bhagram and Guantánamo that the U.S. government established far from the prying eyes of lawyers, judges, legislators, family members, aid agencies, human-rights observers, and God, they hoped.

It has since been revealed that precise discussions of permissible torture were held in the White House between George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice, among others—presumably not shackled in “stress positions” with panties on their heads. In any case, by the time ignorant, scared, and actively misled young American soldiers and MPs took over Saddam Hussein’s most infamous torture chamber in 2003, they were well prepared to perpetuate the nightmare.

The Pentagon, however, was not prepared for the digital age, and heads of state were (temporarily) rocked when photos surfaced of dead, degraded, and otherwise abused captives, usually accompanied by idiotically grinning G.I.s in menacing and/or intoxicated poses.

Morris’s concern here, presented with his usual technological flourishes, is less with images of former soldier guards Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and others—most of whom he interviews as they appear today, still alarmingly unreflective after short prison spells—than with who was orchestrating the acts that the images depict. These people are always just out of view. The victims—mostly dragged off the street in arbitrary sweeps—remain faceless in this process, but the veteran filmmaker is here confronting our conveniently dismissive view of the “bad apples”, not of the lives they smashed. Whether there is an appetite for that dialectic is seriously in doubt.