There’s a chilling-sounding new book out: Standard Operating Procedure, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. It’s the story of American soldiers who were sent to Iraq as ‘liberators’ only to find themselves working as jailers in Saddam Hussein’s old dungeons, responsible for implementing the sort of policy they were supposed to be fighting against. It is the story of a defining moment in the war, and a defining moment in our understanding of ourselves— – the story of the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs of prisoner abuse, as seen through the eyes, and told through the voices, of the soldiers who took them and appeared in them. It is the story of how those soldiers were at once the instruments of a great injustice and the victims of a great injustice.

Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris’’s frank and intimate interviews with the soldier-photographers who gave us what have become the iconic images of the Iraq war, Standard Operating Procedure is a book that makes you see, and makes you feel, and above all makes you think about what it means to be human. It is an original book that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines, and long after the current (and past) cronies in the US administration – and British and Australian Governments – have putted in their last golf ball laughing all the way that they have escaped the war crimes tribunals they so blatantly deserve to face, not to mention their copious violations of the Geneva Conventions. Americans, Brits and Aussies should (and many will) feel and bear the shame that attends such horrific actions.