Words At Large

In the spring of 2004, the world was shocked by the now notorious photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, located just west of Baghdad in Iraq.

Four years later, those images remain the subject of a nation’s soul-searching debate: are they proof that the American military systematically abused Iraqi detainees or do they merely document the aberrant behaviour of “a few bad apples”?

Standard Operating Procedure (Penguin) is a written collaboration between award-winning author Philip Gourevitch and filmmaker Errol Morris, who released a film of the same name and on the same subject.

The book is based partly on more than 200 hours of interviews done with the soldiers who were implicated in the abuses. Gourevitch also quotes from court transcripts and reportage in an effort to understand the context in which they occurred.

This is “a war story that takes its place among the classics,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

From a CBC studio in New York, Philip Gourevitch talks with Mary Lou Findley about the infamous images and the soldiers responsible for them. Listen to their conversation.

First aired June 18, 2008 on As It Happens. [runs: 22:21]