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REPORTAGE:DRAWING UPON 18 months of conversations with his collaborator, film-maker Errol Morris, who conducted hundreds of hours of interviews for his motion picture of the same title, Philip Gourevitch's Standard Operating Procedures is a compelling and damning deconstruction of the story behind the infamous photographs that emerged in April 2004, depicting US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners - naked, hooded, shackled, beaten up, forced to masturbate, and terrorised by dogs - at Abu Ghraib prison.

As Gourevitch reminds us, the story of how the US walked away from the Third Geneva Convention's requirement that prisoners of war "be entitled in all circumstances to respect for their persons and their honour" actually began just days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, as evidenced by a series of secret memoranda, overseen by Vice-President Cheney's legal counsel, David Addington, which asserted extraordinary powers for the US president in wartime, including the authority to sanction torture.