Rene Rodriguez; 25/6/08
Photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, the US military prison in Iraq where the abuse and humiliation of detainees was documented in snapshots taken by soldiers, led to worldwide anger and disgust. A lot of that anger was specifically directed at the Americans who appeared in the photos, laughing while holding leashes attached to dog collars around the necks of prisoners or flashing a jolly thumbs-up sign while crouching above the corpse of a suspected terrorist. But in Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary film by Errol Morris, the director takes a closer look at the photos in the hopes of finding out why, exactly, they even existed. “It was my curiosity about the Abu Ghraib photographs that was the initial inspiration for the movie; the fact that they had been so widely seen by millions of people, yet we knew so very little about them, the people who took them and the circumstances under which they were taken,” Morris says.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23917300-16947,00.html
