Standard Operating Procedure: Take Action

Standard Operating Procedure
by Philip Gourevitch & Errol Morris

Standard Operating Procedure is a war story that takes its place among the classics. It is 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.

Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War
by Tara McKelvey

In April 2004, the Abu Ghraib photographs set off an international scandal. Yet until this book, the full story behind that scandal has never been told. Tara McKelvey-the first U.S. journalist to speak with female prisoners from Abu Ghraib-traveled to the Middle East and across the United States to seek out victims and perpetrators.

McKelvey tells how soldiers, acting in an atmosphere that encouraged abuse and sadism, were unleashed on a prison population of whom the vast majority, according to Army documents, were innocent citizens. She gained unprecedented access to soldiers, officers, administration officials, and suspected terrorists. She also provides an inside look at Justice Department theories of presidential power to show how the many abuses were licensed by the government.

Reaching Past the Wire: A Nurse at Abu Ghraib
by Deanna Germain & Connie Lounsbury

On a frigid afternoon in February 2003, Deanna Germain, a nurse practitioner and new grandmother living in Blaine, Minnesota, received the registered letter she had hoped would never arrive. In six days she was to report for active duty as war loomed in Iraq. The purpose of mobilization: "For Enduring Freedom."

With startling detail, Lt. Col. Germain offers a clear-eyed account of life as a nursing supervisor behind the fortified gates of Abu Ghraib. Her duty: To treat Iraqi prisoners, U.S. soldiers, and Marines in need of medical attention. Shortly after she arrived, the notorious prison made headlines around the world for abuses that had stopped months before. Despite unbearable heat, frequent mortar attacks, medical supply shortages, substandard facilities, the relentless stench of war, and sleepless nights quartered in a tiny prison cell, Germain served the medical needs of each of her patients with remarkable humanity.

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
by Mark Danner

In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of "a few bad apples"? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the "war on terror"?

The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how "Hooded Man" and "Leashed Man" could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book.

Nonfiction: Photographs by Nubar Alexanian from the film sets of Errol Morris
by Nubar Alexanian

What happens when a documentary photographer who has developed his own fly on the wall approach to his subjects is invited into the bizarre, disturbing, and humorous world of a filmmaker who tells true stories through the use of reenacted scenes?

The result is Nonfiction, acclaimed photographer Nubar Alexanian's collection of more than seventy beautiful and unnerving black & white photographs from the sets of award winning filmmaker Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, Mr. Death, Standard Operating Procedure, and First Person Series.

Nonfiction leaves you wondering where facts stop and fiction begins. Distinctions between reality and imagination are made irrelevant in the emotional impact of these often tender renderings of human violence, and in Alexanian's (and Morris's) own relationship with the oddity, gentleness, and incomprehensible nature of human creativity and destruction.