"She liked to look. She might recoil from violence, but she was drawn to its aftermath. When others wanted to look away, she'd want to look more closely. Wounded and dead bodies fascinated her." This is what Philip Gourevitch, editor of The Paris Review, and collaborator with Errol Morris in the making of the movie and book Standard Operating Procedure, tells us about Specialist Sabrina Harman--the MP who took many of the infamous pictures at Abu Ghraib. Those pictures, and the stories told through interviews with the soldiers who participated in the humiliation and, yes, torture at that prison, are the basis of the book and the movie.

What interests me is how much more immediate and inflected and human Gourevitch's writing is than I found the movie, filled with "re-creations," to be. Gourevitch, who has prominently taken some issue with the idea of "objective" journalism, writes in a way that without being polemical tells you exactly where he stands. At its best, it transcends outrage and achieves a kind of surreal bafflement about this notorious and shameful episode in our history.