Author(s): Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris

Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East and War on Terror

"Standard Operating Procedure" is an utterly original collaboration by the writer Philip Gourevitch ("We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families") and the film-maker Errol Morris ("The Thin Blue Line" and "The Fog of War"). They have produced the first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib."Standard Operating Procedure" reveals the stories of the American soldiers who took and appeared in the haunting digital snapshots from Abu Ghraib prison that shocked the world - and simultaneously illuminates and alters forever our understanding of those images and the events they depict. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris' startlingly frank and intimate interviews with Americans who served at Abu Ghraib and with some of their Iraqi prisoners, as well as on his own research, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising account of Iraq's occupation from the inside-out - rendering vivid portraits of guards and prisoners ensnared in an appalling breakdown of command authority and moral order.Gourevitch and Morris have crafted a non-fiction morality play that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines.