Standard Operating Procedure is credited to both Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris—whose documentary film of the same name is out now—but the book was written by Gourevitch, who used interviews and documents that Morris collected for his motion picture. Gourevitch, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, 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. It is a work of investigative journalism, identifying key military players, analyzing papers and presenting time lines crucial to understanding how the prison became a mess of inexperience and torture (the joke of the title is that there was no standard, only confusion).

In addition to providing a lucid explanation of the military prison’s power structure, Gourevitch captures the voices of the victimizers—Sabrina Harman, Lynndie England and Charles Graner, among others. Here he slips into the intimate second person, giving us the perspective of the MPs (“if anyone asked, it was your word against a suspected terrorist’s”). The point isn’t to absolve the abusers, but to take the story outside the frame of the photographs that came to define Abu Ghraib.

The photographs themselves are conspicuously absent, and this allows Gourevitch to pace his analysis—the shocks arrive through language alone. He is interested in interrogating the ways that “ocular proof” function as evidence and coverup. Sabrina Harman, he points out, faced charges for having photographed a dead Iraqi detainee. Meanwhile, no one has been held accountable for murdering that detainee in the first place.

Gourevitch and Morris read May 13, 2008.