I am very much a fan of documentarian Errol Morris who, for my money, is the absolute best director working at his craft in the world today. Morris has an uncanny gift for drawing genuine responses out of his subjects and for putting things together in such a way that they present a compelling story without being manipulative in the least. He's the anti-Michael Moore, basically, a documentarian who keeps himself purely in the background and lets his subjects peak for themselves. In the early going who used a string of goofy subjects - pet cemetaries, lion tamers, topiary gardeners, etc - to draw out larger statements about human nature but he has been tackling much harder topics over the last few films, now, and as the Oscar on his mantle would indicate, he's been doing so rather well. His latest, Standard Operating Procedure, took home the Silver Bear at this year's Berlinale and presents a gripping look at the larger story of Abu Ghraib.

Is it possible for a photograph to change the world? Photographs taken by soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison changed the war in Iraq and changed America’s image of itself. Yet, a central mystery remains. Did the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs constitute evidence of systematic abuse by the American military, or were they documenting the aberrant behavior of a few “bad apples”?

We set out to examine the context of these photographs. Why were they taken? What was happening outside the frame? We talked directly to the soldiers who took the photographs and who were in the photographs. Who are these people? What were they thinking? Over two years of investigation, we amassed a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs. The story of Abu Ghraib is still shrouded in moral ambiguity, but it is clear what happened there.

The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an expose and a coverup. An expose, because the photographs offer us a glimpse of the horror of Abu Ghraib; and a coverup because they convinced journalists and readers they had seen everything, that there was no need to look further. In recent news reports, we have learned about the destruction of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation tapes. A coverup. It has been front page news. But the coverup at Abu Ghraib involved thousands of prisoners and hundreds of soldiers. We are still learning about the extent of it.

Many journalists have asked about “the smoking gun” of Abu Ghraib. It is the wrong question. As Philip Gourevitch has commented, Abu Ghraib is the smoking gun. The underlying question that we still have not resolved, four years after the scandal: how could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib—and the subsequent coverup —could happen?

You'll find the trailer for the film in the Twitch Player below the break.