Wow, where do I start ? Let see, maybe the camera rule should be more strictly enforced, I mean talk about feeding the fire. Lets see: sell my soul to the devil, who is the devil ? "Your going to screw up your life anyway, so why not let us do it for you (we'll do a much better job of it)". When a fire burns, it can hurt, it can maim, it can kill, but when it goes out , it's gone, it's finished, it's over. I gave the book 4 stars because it should have been at least 100 pages longer.

A straight forward look at Abu Ghraib. This book is intense, hard-hitting and to be quite honest very difficult to read. It is very thought provoking and really makes one wonder, what has become of us and what has this war on terror led us to? It is a war that we must win at all costs and this book makes us look at the costs. And it is difficult to accept that this is where we've come. One section of the book talks about how George Washington treated Hessian prisoners of war so well in the American Revolution that many eventually moved to America after the war. We have come a long way. It is thankfully a fast read of a book, it is gut-wrenching to read and to really find out what was going on at Abu Ghraib. The book starts with a very brief background of Abu Ghraib(BEFORE) and some of the horrors that took place there under Saddam Hussein and quickly moves to how and why America used Abu Ghraib. Then the bulk of the book (DURING) details the timeline and events that led to the pictures that are seared in our minds. A brief wrapup (AFTER) concludes the book. Note while there are no pictures or graphs or maps of any kind in the book I found it to be more intense because of this. A simple explanation will trigger the picture in your mind. I never spent a whole lot of time examining the now infamous pictures but the images were so clearly invoked in my mind when reading passages of what was going on. The author so clearly states the power of an image and while that image can not tell the whole story it certainly reveals a story of it's own. SOP tells the whole story and if you think this is all because of a couple renegade, out-of-control soldiers then you need to read this book.
Frankly, by the time I was finished I didn't know who to blame or point a finger at. I just felt alot of sadness and despair and disgust.

As much as the Bush administration would like to have the main photo image of the war in Iraq be the pulling down of Saddam's statue during the initial invasion, the most famous photograph of the war is quite different. It is of a skinny figure, hooded, standing on a box, arms raised and fingers attached to electrical cables. It and the other shocking images from the prison at Abu Ghraib revealed a callous disregard for the rights of prisoners and for basic human rights, and an acceptance of torture as a means for the soldiers in charge of prisoners to soften them up for questioning. The pictures tell a shocking story, but not the whole story; this is the point of _Standard Operating Procedure_ (The Penguin Press) by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. The book was written by Gourevitch, but it comes from conversations with Morris, who had conducted interviews, evaluated pictures, and studied records for his documentary film with the same name as the book. Tellingly, the book has no photographs. Not only are the images available in lots of other places, and not only are they sadly familiar to us all; the book shows that much of what was important at Abu Ghraib was never photographed, and that some of the photos distorted the real story.

There were at one time 5,000 prisoners (actually called "security detainees" to keep them from the legal protection that prisoners might get) in the prison, which was designed to hold 2,500 and certainly no more than 4,000. The military has since determined that three quarters of the inmates were not guilty of any crime; most of them were simply picked up in broad sweeps by the military police. The financing and the manning of the prison was botched. The military took over from the Justice Department later in 2003, and the soldiers assigned there simply did not know what they were doing. They were combat Military Policemen, used to being heavily armed to support front-line operations; they were not the MPs who are trained to be guards, including training in such things as the Geneva Conventions. When the incoming guards were told that their mission was to support Military Intelligence in their quest to get all the information they could from the prisoners, the guards didn't know better. Since the prisoners were not classed as prisoners of war, and since there were no rules to cover how they were to be treated, the guards made up what to do as they went along, including intimidation with dogs, the famous mock-electrocutions, and the pyramids of naked prisoners with grinning American soldiers in the foreground. One guard had sufficient understanding to write home that the prisoners weren't terrorists but because of Abu Ghraib would be the terrorists of the future. When the photos leaked to the outside world, the outrage resulted in some of the soldiers getting long sentences, but exactly zero senior officers were found guilty of serious malpractice. Think about this: There was a prisoner who was beaten to death within the prison (no, the techniques used were not just humiliation). A guard took photos of his corpse, and got six months in jail. The men who beat him to death never got charged.

Such imbalance shows the distorted opinions and actions that can come from these horrid photos. It is probably true that the abuse in Abu Ghraib (and its incalculable damage of infamy upon our nation) would not have come to light had the photographs not existed. They made the crimes depicted sensational and they provoked instantaneous indignation in any viewer (except those predisposed to think that the hilarity depicted was something you might see at a typical fraternity house). Gourevitch and Morris, however, remind us that every picture tells a story, but none of them tell the full story. Every picture shows abuse by low-ranking soldiers, and no picture shows the command or the administration that was responsible for the confusion and lack of discipline that allowed the abuse to occur. No picture shows how a few of the soldiers were real sadists, but most were doing a job and carrying on what the group reinforced. No picture shows that most of the detainees were innocent, and no picture shows the children that were also detained as a matter of pressuring their prisoner parents. No picture shows prisoners being beaten to death. The larger story, what the pictures cannot tell, is what this astonishing, distressing book brings. There is little polemic here, although one could not tell this story without some disgust. The resounding question is one that ends one of the book's chapters: "If you fight terror with terror, how can you tell which is which?"

A devastating book, both in its depiction of genuinely rancid individual behavior in an awful time and place and the ways in which those in charge promoted said behavior in a myriad of ways (from the tone created by George W. Bush's Iraqi War rhetoric, which filtered its way to every level of the military, to ghost-like military interrogators who freely moved in and out of Abu Ghraib and who made it known they wanted the prisoners softened up to the seemingly endless run of mid-level soldiers who knew what was going on and gave implicit permission by not only not complaining, but by not even reacting to (pick one) naked men on leashes, pyramids of naked humanity, men beaten, intimidated by dogs, forced to crawl through filth, men who soiled themselves, men who bled and died). What's most impressive is the subtlety of Gourevitch's approach here, he gets a lot of mileage out of the distance between the behavior of the people involved in taking the infamous photographs and what they say now of the incidents. He never overtly addresses this dichotomy but it hangs over much of the book and it's a complex brew of rationalization, hubris, self-justification of truly odious, inhuman behavior, and genuine sadness and regret over what they'd done. The book paints the whole "one bad apple" notion as impossibly simplistic and self-righteous, not just by laying out the case for explicit and implicit orders from above, but by laying bare the involved soldiers' fears and confusions, their inability to figure out where the morality line resides. How do young men and women trained to do exactly what they're told figure out when some imaginary line is crossed and even if they do, how do they do something about it in the face of a military bureaucracy that is wink winking its way past the torture?

And though judicious in his overt analysis of the situation, Gourevitch writes some startlingly good passages. He carefully lays out the case for why Bush/Cheney and gang invaded Iraq in the first place and not because of phantom WMDs, but because of a belief in the inherent superiority of our cultural mindset. We are the remaining superpower, America stands for all things right and true, for the collective freedom of man - for democracy and doing the right thing - and we were going to bring these values to a morally compromised backwater. And by doing so, Gourevitch makes the case for Abu Ghraib as THE central metaphor for the whole awful enterprise, a place where every instinct, both personal and collective, turns out to be not just wrong, but morally, criminally so. Near the end of the book he writes about a prisoner known as AQ (an Iraqi believed, wrongly it turned out - this comes up again and again, how often the tortured turned out to be regular Iraqis picked up in large sweeps -- to be Al Queda) being terrorized by dogs, "It does not seem possible to amplify the drama of this moment, but the look on AQ's face does just that. He has the horrified, drawn-back, and quivering expression of a thoroughly blasted soul." Gourevitch ends this paragraph with this, "The pictures of AQ on that night before New Year's Eve are the last known photographs of our prisoners on the MI block at Abu Ghraib, which seems fitting, because these pictures don't leave much to the viewer's imagination, except the obvious question: if you fight terror with terror, how can you tell which is which."

And then there's this, which is to my mind the central passage of the entire book: "So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq war that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had help up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine - not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideas had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing. It was our image versus the enemy's, a standard, in this case, by which it was easy to stoop appallingly low before being caught out. The Abu Ghraib photographs caught us out."

Thus does Abu Ghraib come to seem the ultimate representation of the Bush/Cheney approach to the war, an approach based on an abstraction and a belief that they were doing 'the right thing.'

This is an important book and one that I think will over time come to be one of THE central books of this war. Gourevitch's interpretations of what the photographs show and what they don't (the easy ways in which photos can deceive us) pushes it into a literary realm that few books like this approach and comes to make the whole idea of objective truth seem a part of the problem.

This is literally a thought provoking work. The authors carefully refrain from judgment and share a dozen carefully interwoven stories: the slapdash way the occupation of Iraq was handled; the deliberately vague guidance given the almost completely untrained national guard platoon; the tragedy that ensues when a group of near-civilians get puffed up with the self-importance that comes from seeing themselves as part of the greatest military machine in the history of the world; the subtlety, beauty and necessity of due process. There are moments -- and I won't spoil them for you, because you will be a better person if you read this book and experience them for youself -- where your jaw will drop as the authors encapsulate all the complexity and moral ambiguity of our current historical conjuncture in a way that is neither superficial nor clicheed. With Roshomonian multiple perspectives, you end up reliving a few very strange hours in the Abu Ghraib prison, but mostly you will have a experience a psychological broadening, as your understanding of the world is widened to encompass the bizarre set of circumstances that produced those photographs. The other reviewer complained because Gourevich and Morris chose not to reprint the photographs; reading this book made me realize that I was carrying eidetic copies of the photographs in my brain, and that those photographs were a unresolved part of my understanding of the last few years. If you were puzzled, appalled or shocked by those photographs, this book is balm for that psychological itch, with the added benefit that it will help you understand our century.

It is a credit to the prose that a subject so upsetting could become a compelling work of literature, which is what this is. A harrowing descent into hell, a meditation on moral complexity, and a sad indictment of what's become of us. The book manages the genuine trick of compassion, to be astutely objective and subjective simultaneously. This is not only a story of Abu Ghraib, of American hubris, but also of human aspiration and folly. Truly a great war book. Stunning read.

This book is very peculiar in omitting all graphics. Let me repeat that: NO GRAPHICS AT ALL. No maps of Iraq. No diagram of the layout of Abu Ghraib. No diagram of the chain of command involved. No time line. And most importantly, not a single one of the photographs discussed or that exists, is shown.

So you ask why? At the very end of the book on p. 283, under "Notes and Acknowledgments" (not in a Preface or Introduction, of which there is neither), there is acknowledgment that no-photos was a deliberate decision, but a decision that is not really explained, except to say you can go elsewhere for them and that they are not the story ("The photographs have a place in the story, but they are not the story")?

I have two reactions to that. (1) Yes, I've seen Errol Morris's blogs on the NYTimes Web site, photos printed in The New Yorker, etc., etc., but it would still be very useful to have some included in print in the book. (2) How can the photographs not be a vital part of the story -- there would be no story without them because none of this would be widely believed without the visual evidence?

YMMV, but to me it needlessly weakens an otherwise valuable book and I don't understand how Errol Morris could put his name on the book with these omissions.

For an American, this is an extremely upsetting book. Actually, for a human being, it is very upsetting, but we Americans have prided ourselves (or at least I was so raised) on being especially civilized, especially humane, and especially respectful of human rights and dignity. Once again, however, we are confronted with our baseness, our inhumanity, our hubris, and our hypocrisy.

I had not followed closely the news as it broke of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, indelibly and graphically documented via photographs. So STANDARD OPERATING PROCUEDURE is essentially my introduction to yet another disgrace, yet another blot on America's honor. (To cite just one example, which does not figure prominently in the book: how on earth can a decent society condone, much less actually practice on a regular basis, incarcerating ten-year-old children in a vile prison, based not on any suspicion that they were criminals or terrorists, but simply as pawns in the military's effort to capture or break their fathers?)

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE is reasonably well-written and, from everything I can tell from internal evidence, the product of a scrupulous effort to be objective. And it certainly is sensitive to all aspects -- whether good, bad, or indifferent -- of the personality and character of the central actors.

What the book does not tell us -- something that may well be impossible to ascertain -- is who really is to blame for these atrocities. I am not referring to the everyday political "blame game"; whether or not the war in Iraq was ill-advised and launched with faulty or fictitious intelligence or with unworthy motives, Abu Ghraib cannot be placed solely at the feet of George W. Bush and the rest of his administration. More directly it is the result of staggering and distressing failures somewhere in the Department of Defense and the Army and, broadly speaking, the war organization. And it certainly is a travesty of justice that a few lowly, untrained, ill-equipped, and poorly supervised soldiers have been incarcerated for these incidents (which, given the circumstances and the absence of proper training, facilities, and supervision, were virtually inevitable) while anonymous higher-ups, who are much more responsible, apparently escape both censure and punishment.

The lesson to me is: As long as the United States is one of the military and economic powers in the world, there will be political debates -- legitimate debates -- about whether or not it should undertake military action or intervention. I can only hope that in the future those debates are conducted and the decisions are made honestly and based on information that is as accurate as possible and shared with the American people. (I would think it a bedrock principle of this nation -- so fundamental that it need not even be expressed in our founding documents -- that our elected leaders do not and will not lie to, deceive, or manipulate "we the people".) But if and when we do make the decision to take military action, we need to ensure we do so with a proper organization and properly trained personnel, so that whatever we do in the name of and for the sake of our ideals is in fact done consistent with our ideals. That clearly has been lacking in Iraq and that lack clearly was reflected in the incidents at Abu Ghraib -- to the everlasting shame of this country.

In an ideal (but, I recognize, utopian) world, there would be required reading for all Americans that would include such landmarks as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and King's "I Have a Dream" speech. But it would also include such things as "Without Sanctuary" (a photographic documentary of our shameful history of lynching), something on our treatment of Native Americans and blacks, something on My Lai, and, now, something on Abu Ghraib. To me it seems constructive that as a precondition for voting, people should spend some time pondering how it is that representatives of a democracy with such noble ideals can engage in such ignoble conduct -- supposedly in the name of law and order, democracy, and freedom. STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE would fulfill my hypothetical required reading with regard to Abu Ghraib.