S.O.P. Standard Operating Procedure

A FILM BY Errol Morris

Morris widens our understanding of the real crimes that took place there. This is where the movie becomes not just a slant on history but also a vehicle for broadening our understanding.

- Mick La Salle, San Francisco Chronicle

Standard Operating Procedure encourages us not to judge but to try to understand. Or, barring that impossibility, it prods us like the finest documentaries to watch and listen.

- Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post

The movie?s a staggering work that traces the rotten blossom of this scandal close to its roots.

- Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Synopsis

Errol Morris, Academy Award® winning documentary filmmaker, trains his camera on the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, the photographs that exposed the scandal and the procedures and legal opinions that made it possible. After two-plus years of investigation, yielding a million and a half words of interview transcript, thousands of pages of unredacted reports, and hundreds of photographs, Morris discovers that "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." While exposing the previously unpublicized scope of the abuse Morris tries to answer the essential and unresolved question, "how could American values become so compromised that Abu Ghraib and the subsequent coverup-could happen?"