Standard Operating Procedure

Saw the documentary, then read the book, and the book provided context that Errol Morris film did not Morris is mainly critical of the low ranking soldiers who performed these tortures, and Gourevitch places most of the blame on higher ups, military intelligence If you think you re going to gain some insight into why this torture happened, you re not, really I am struck by how little the players involved seem to understand why they did what they did And how at the end of the day, there was reall [...]

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDUREBy Philip Gourevitch and Errol MorrisWhile the general public in this country is somewhat knowledgeable of the prolonged agonies of the ongoing Iraq War, few of us are as acutely aware of the dark cloud of atrocities accompanying that war Information about the progress and purpose of that war are parceled out by the somewhat restricted media, the serious and sad aspects of what is actually happening are scrutinized before the media releases that information, leaving [...]

If this book doesn t infuriate the reader, then I don t know what will There are many angles one can find outrage in, from the simple mistreatment of people to bad leadership and poor decisionmaking all down the line who allows cameras in a corrections facility to the gross brutality and dereliction of duty, but the book tries to show that pictures flashed in the media only tell part of a story and have to be investigated and seen in context Were the MPs guilty of many injustices They sure were, [...]

A quote from the final chapter that argues that Abu Ghraib was but a microcosm of the ineptitude of the war itself But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality The staging was part of the reality they documented And the grins, the thumbs up, the arms crossed over puffed out chests all this unseemly swagger and self regard was the height of amateur [...]

Amazing Gourevitch wrote the book based on Errol Morris movie Just like in Fog of War, I found myself sympathizing with perpetrators of war crimes I remember being upset with the people in the Abu Ghraib photos for doing that This book shed light on the systemic issues that led to those pictures, and reports from the photographers about why they were doing it And does so without making excuses for anyone.

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 [...]

Read the STOP SMILING interview excerpt with filmmaker Errol MorrisTHE ELEVEN MINUTE PSYCHIATRISTBy James Hughes This interview originally appeared in STOP SMILING The Documentary Issue What follows is a brief excerpt from our extensive cover story interview with Errol Morris, the groundbreaking filmmaker behind such works as Gates of Heaven 1980 , The Thin Blue Line 1988 and the Oscar winner The Fog of War Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara 2004 The full interview with Morris app [...]

Meticulously researched, this account of Abu Graib prison in Iraq is a must read to understand much of the current disquiet in the Middle East It should be compulsory reading for every politician and aspiring politician.

Proviso I haven t seen Errol Morris film I hear it s great though.I come to this book knowing little too little about the Abu Ghraib abuses As far as information goes, it was a discrete, easy to process bit of piecemeal please file under hypocritical American policies and ha I told you so s Another in a long, time worn opprobrious national malfeasances My Lai Iran Contra Gitmo Abu Ghraib No one thought much about it myself included because it never seemed to demand understanding That issues of s [...]

I was tempted to set this book down quite a few times This is not a vacation novel This is not the book I wanted to be reading under the Eiffel Tower.But once I got to Part II, During, I couldn t not finish The Ballad of Abu Ghraib is not a page turner I didn t really want to know what happened next Watching an utter catastrophe unfold is hard, and for the first time in a while, closing this book didn t feel in some way cathartic or redemptive I know that I will understand the situation better i [...]

a certain remove that comes from being written from secondary sources.

Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison, once the torture prison of Saddam Hussein, then the scene of notorious US abuse, violation and unlawful killing is a tough subject for a book But Gourevitch does a fine job of navigating his and our way through the tortuous maze of inhumanity, inefficiency, and a frightening kind of empathy with victims and victors alike.After a brief background this is told from the point of view, with extensive quotes, from the soldiers themselves, some of whom are now in prison f [...]

This is a book without heroes It is not simply a rehash of the great Errol Morris documentary of the same name Gourevitch used the documents and hours of interviews gathered by Morris to create something along the same lines as the movie but entirely unique As in the film, he tells the story of Abu Ghraib from the viewpoint of the soldiers involved Morris, in the movie, avoids editorializing He instead allows the soldiers to speak for themselves while not hiding the horrors of what they did If t [...]

So the author chose not to include the photographs themselves in the text, and explains his rationale at the very end It s honestly understandable, but it also means that when the photographs are discussed which is often Gourevitch describes them, focusing on the details he finds most notable This ultimately takes away from some of what these photographs mean and what the book has to say about them they reflect us, both as viewers and as Americans, and to read Gourevitch s descriptions of them i [...]

Most people will recall the disturbing photographs seen on the news of American soldiers abusing inmates of Iraq s Abu Ghraib prison Standard Operating Procedure is an account of how such treatment of prisoners came about, as the US army found itself torturing mostly innocent civilians picked up on general sweeps of problem areas, who they still believed they were liberating from such treatment without perceiving the bitter irony of the situation.The authors do not editorialise overly, although [...]

Gourevitch makes a really well done narrative from dozens of interviews with Abu Ghraib prison guards, as well as some of the officials involved in its planning I was consistently impressed with the skill he had in distilling the interviews into plot, character, tone, and a fascinating exploration of the psychology and causation of the prisoner abuse there The only issue I had was that Gourevitch never attempts to analyze the cause of the atrocities He thoroughly undermines the one bad apple exc [...]

Oh boy This one s a must read for fans of Creative Non Fiction I ll warn you now, though it s not pleasant reading It s a forensic account of the events which occurred in the high security blocks of Abu Gharib prison, culminating in the worldwide release of the now notorious photographs and the outrage that followed.But it s not a simple tell all tale Rather it s a portrait of many things of military culture, the pressures of the front line, of flawed chains of command, of the most basic demons [...]

Co written with Errol Morris as a companion to his film, this is a standout effort I read this a few months ago, and only afterward did I watch the film for the first time I purposely approached it in this way intuiting that I might better understand the gravity of the circumstances and the people portrayed, and in this regard I believe the experience the knowingness was, in fact, sharply defined.Having also since read Morris s Believing Is Seeing, about the power of photographs to distort and [...]

this book was a gift from a relative and fellow vet, COL Ret Lane McCotter If you have read the book, he is mentioned on page one and follows him as he set up Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq I was in Iraq during this timeframe, athough in a different part of the country, and I emember hearing bits and seeing the news about the goings on there, though I never really understood what happened there This book explains it all, from the start and through all theevents that gave the prison such a bad name th [...]

This is a seriously intense, and yet sympathetic view into the horrors of Abu Gharaib and the infamous photos that blew the lid on the US s disgusting treatment of the prisoners under their care.What stands out in the book is the humanity of the guards People like Lindie England, so demonised in the press, who were simply way out of their depth in a system that demanded their normalisation of atrocity.And atrocity is the word By the end of the book you the reader will also be stunned at how acts [...]

This book make me cried From line to line when they described the torture and how the prisoner response to it, I couldn t wait to flip next page and be done with it I read this book with the purpose of trying to listen two sides of horrible story that occurs in Abu Ghraib I was wrong I found 2 sides of it but whether the American soldier side make a convincing argument why they did those things, it troubled me You can t blame the weather, lack of bureaucracy,unclear chain of command and getting [...]

Abu Ghraib was a disgusting shameful act that demeaned the US, the military, the spy agencies, the coalition of the willing, and the west It did as much harm to democracy and peace as terrorist acts But that is just my opinion and as I was tens of thousands of miles away with no situational awareness of events I may be mistaken.So what happened, how did it occur and why was it internationally portrayed as an aberration the failing of a few low ranked military personnel This important book takes [...]

Phillip Gourevitch earned my trust when he wrote We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families on the Rwandan Genocide In Standard Operating Procedure Gourevitch collaborates with Errol Morris to write a story about the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where numerous prisoner abuses occurred complete with pictures that flooded the media several years ago My opinion of this book is very much like what Gourevitch says towards the end about a picture telling a story Gourevitch ha [...]

i read this and bugliosi s prosecution of george w bush for murder at the same time they made fine companion pieces whereas bugliosi s provides a macro level view of the clusterfuck that is the war in iraq, gourevitch s and morris mining of the abu ghraib clusterfuck illustrates how this administration s lack of foresight and leadership, as well as the many failures and inadequacies of the military industrial complex led to an utter breakdown in moral authority and accountability this is an impo [...]

I SO wanted to like this book I m a big fan of Gourevitch and his book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families was hands down one of the most moving works I ve ever read However, S.O.P was a meandering, difficult, and scattered read that I picked up and put down a dozen times over the course of two months in an effort to finish it Truth is, it s a nearly impossible task to put to light all the horrifying acts that happened in the history of Abu Ghraib And it sure [...]

A good but mentally hard read at least for me it was I don t like to think that humans are capable of such acts but the reality is that we are However, this book presents the situation from a perspective that the public was almost entirely not able to see We saw horror We saw pictures but the reality behind it was that the people that were doing these things are people, too There was so much going wrong at the time Attacks, death, and leaders that had gone awry Even our own president that determ [...]

This book gives you the opportunity to discover brutal aspects of the Abu Ghraib prison, used during the Iraq war You will understand how sometimes men can totally loose his brain and make actions really deplorable und brutal At the same time the book bring you to think that as always the people who paid are not the only responsible but there is always somebody most of the times, staying in higher position who is able to escape to his punishment Without doubt the history of Abu Ghraib and its ph [...]

If you are interested in seeing just how messed up operations were in Iraq, this provides a detailed overview of a few months in Abu Ghraib Prison This book shows how an absence of leadership allowed torture to happen not only to the bad guys, but innocent ones as well Did you know that Iraqi civilans were imprisioned for being in the vicinity of an attack whether they were linked or not Did you know that prisoners were tortured regularly, when their guilt or innocence was unclear I always figur [...]

I don t remember how this book came to be on my to read list, or why this of all the books on the list was one I bought this summer to read, but somehow I ended up with it I was expecting a fictional novel and the book is not that at all It is an account of the happenings at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq based on interviews with soldiers who were a part of it all At times the author s opinions, which were expressed over and over again, almost made me stop reading since I disagreed with much of what [...]

Nick Flynn wrote The Ticking is the Bomb which is also about Abu Ghraib He s not a big fan of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib so I m going to read both and compare My initial impressions of The Ballad of Abu Ghraib was that it is a thoroughly researched expose on the incident The whole situation is shocking and hard for me to digest The book is basically collected interviews from the participants woven in with quotes from various procedural guides from Gitmo and Abu Ghraib The interviewees unfortunatel [...]