Standard Operating Procedure - Softcover

Philip Gourevitch; Errol Morris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330455966 ISBN 13: 9780330455961

Publisher: PENGUIN Group (USA) Inc., 2008

Synopsis

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.

In a tradition of moral and political reckoning, and all-powerful story-telling, that runs from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor to Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Philip Gourevitch has written a relentlessly surprising and perceptive account of the front lines of the war on terror. Drawing on more than two hundred hours of Errol Morris’s startlingly 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 utterly original book that stands to endure as essential reading long after the current war in Iraq passes from the headlines—a work of searing power from two of our finest masters of nonfiction, working at the peak of their powers.

Philip Gourevitch is the award-winning author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.

Errol Morris is a world-renowned filmmaker-the Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War and the recipient of a MacArthur genius award. His other films include Mr. Death, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, A Brief History of Time, and The Thin Blue Line.

About this title

About the Author

Philip Gourevitch is the award-winning author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case. He is the editor of The Paris Review and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker.

Errol Morris is a world-renowned filmmaker-the Academy Award-winning director of The Fog of War and the recipient of a MacArthur genius award. His other films include Mr. Death, Fast Cheap & Out of Control, A Brief History of Time, and The Thin Blue Line.

Review

“Here, author and journalist Gourevitch and documentary filmmaker Morris have compiled the complete story of Abu Ghraib, from Iraqi prison to prison of occupying American forces, and the crimes its walls concealed—only some of which were revealed in photographs that hit the global media in 2003. Drawing from Morris’s lengthy interviews with the soldiers who photographed and participated in prisoner abuse, the authors render in clear detail the horror and inhumanity of Abu Ghraib, for prisoner and guard alike: “Inexperienced, untrained, under attack, and under orders to do wrong, the low-ranking reservist MPs who implemented the nefarious policy... knew that what they were doing was immoral, and they knew that if it wasn't illegal, it ought to be.” From the squalid conditions to the lack of regulations to the appalling acts that jolted the world, this chronicle of unconscionable behavior, and the political maneuvering that took place in its aftermath, is as much a page-turner as any fictional thriller. Companion to Morris’s documentary film of the same name, this deft piece of reportage will stir readers’ anger, at both the actions and the consequences; not only was the torture purposeless (“Nobody has even bothered to pretend otherwise”), but “no soldier above the rank of sergeant ever served jail time... [and] Nobody was ever charged with torture, or war crimes, or any violation of the Geneva Conventions.” A thorough, terrifying account of an American-made “bedlam,” the latest from Gourevitch is as troubling, and arguably as important, as his 1998 Rwanda investigation We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This book has to be read.”
—Newsweek

“A tightly knit and damning narrative... one of the most devastating of the many books on Iraq.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Philip Gourevitch’s exemplary book will take its toll for years.”
—The New York Observer

“Fascinating.”
—The Economist

“Gourevitch’s eye for telling detail evokes the best of The New Yorker tradition—Capote's In Cold Blood, Hersey's Hiroshima... Standard Operating Procedure is essential reading for our time.”
—The Tennessean

“As much a page-turner as any fictional thriller... A thorough, terrifying account of an American-made ‘bedlam,’ the latest from Gourevitch is as troubling, and arguably as important, as his 1998 Rwanda investigation We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families.”
—Publishers Weekly

“[A] gut wrenching morality check”
—NPR’s Talk of the Nation

“Admirable... remarkable power”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“A compelling story... [Gourevitch] is a master of looking more closely, which means both more sympathetically and more critically... Gourevitch’s account takes us outside the frame, giving us the chance to understand the dynamic of the unit in which violence and romance were S.O.P... The book shows how lawlessness became the law.”
—The Los Angeles Times

“Remarkable.”
—The Denver Post

“Gourevitch...brings to this study of the Abu Ghraib scandal the same graceful balancing of reportage and insight that marked his extraordinary book on the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families... the shocks arrive through language alone.”
—Time Out NY

Edition details

• Publisher: PENGUIN Group (USA) Inc.
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0330455966
• ISBN 13: 9780330455961
• Binding: Paperback