Wired profiles Errol Morris with a lengthy story. It doesn’t mention the debate over Morris’ paying people to be in his new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure.

But it does have another example of something I’ve mentioned before, namely Morris’s ability to posit seemingly meaningful questions that, if you think about them for about, oh, thirty seconds, really aren’t that profound:

It is one of the outstanding ironies of Morris’ story that the photographs, which were seen by the world as documentary evidence of torture, were used as a way to distract attention from the brutal crimes that took place off-camera. While the low-ranking soldiers caught in the staged pictures went to prison, the teams of professional Army and CIA interrogators who actually tortured and murdered prisoners inside Abu Ghraib were never identified or punished.

First of all, who “used” the photos in that way? The U.S. service people who took the photos were clearly mistreating the prisoners they were supposed to be guarding. They were appropriately punished. But the implication here is that there was a unseen hand (literally absent in the sentence by the use of the passive) “using” the shots to “distract attention.”

There’s a separate issue of how far up the chain of command awareness ran of these activities—I’m talking specifically about the abuse by low-level soldiers and the photo-taking. I haven’t seen the movie, but it doesn’t seem that Morris is making that point.

He’s saying the controversy of the photos is covering up systematic torture and abuse by interrogators. I’m not a big-deal political documentary maker, but hasn’t that been the subject of years of front-page news of scandals, congressional hearings, political maneuvering and court cases? That whole “distracting attention” plan sure isn’t working! And the interrogators haven’t been tried because it’s a U.S. policy that, obviously, is under discussion, though you or I might think it’s wrong.

This is what I mean by Morris’s sophistry. “Isn’t that interesting?” he’s always quoted as saying. Well, no. Imagine a right-winger saying something similar: “The real irony is that the treatment of pregnancy in ‘Juno’ and ‘Knocked Up’ is being used to distract attention from the real crime, which is that 1.5 million innocent babies are brutally murdered in the womb each year. I find that very interesting.” He wouldn’t be taken seriously. Why is Errol Morris?