Lifting the hood on Abu Ghraib

Documentary maker Errol Morris won the Silver Bear jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival in February for his film about American torture in Iraq, crafted around the iconic image of the black-hooded man standing cruciform with wires attached to his hands at the Abu Ghraib prison camp.

Now Standard Operating Procedure has finally opened at cinemas in America. It is not expected to equal the box office of an action flick. But as it reaches screens across America and around the world, it will be held up as peerless testimony to all that has gone wrong since President Bush took office.

That is because Morris illuminates the deeper perversity behind the outrages committed in Bush's 'war on terror'.

Morris made his name in 1978 with Gates of Heaven. He grew to cult status with The Thin Blue Line in 1988, credited with solving the murder of a policeman and saving an innocent man from the electric chair.

The film critic Roger Ebert says: "Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini." But because his work has been in documentaries, Morris has made ends meet with adverts for clients like Apple Computer. He is married to an art historian, has one son and lives near Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Standard Operating Procedure is the military euphemism for what went on at Abu Ghraib. By collecting hundreds of the photographs taken by the men and women of 372nd Military Police Company, the notorious Lynndie England among them, and recording a million and a half words in interviews, Morris has peered behind the face-value horror of torture.

He discovered a degree of personal ignorance and poor training that made flouting the Geneva Convention easy. The MPs found it hilarious when a bullying sergeant chained a man "like Jesus" and "poked at his dick".

Morris says he found a willingness to abdicate personal morality in favour of "just following orders" and "doing my job". That is the mentality which enables totalitarian carnage. And the man in the black hood was tormented and photographed for fun.

In an article for the New Yorker, Morris reveals how the MPs named their victim Gilligan and that he was being "softened up" for Military Intelligence. He was hooded and draped in the blanket and made to stand on the box. His torturers included Specialist Sabrina Harman, the most prolific of the photographers.

Another noticed the cables hanging from the wall and had an idea. He checked they were dead, attached them to Gilligan's fingers, and told him to hold his arms out straight. They made him hold the pose long enough to take the photos. "I knew he wouldn't be electrocuted so it didn't really bother me," said Harman.

Gilligan was deemed innocent and spared further torture. Harman, who mugged for the camera with mangled corpses, said: "He was just a funny, funny guy. If you were going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him."

Morris writes: "The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot ­ or do not want to ­ understand about how it came to this." ·