Related: The Macleans.ca Interview: Errol Morris | The Academy Award-winning director talks about cover-ups, voyeurism and finding beauty at Abu Ghraib

Draped in a blanket, a hooded man stands barefoot on a cardboard box with his arms outstretched, his fingers trailing electrical wires. Among all the pictures of prisoner abuse snapped by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, that image is the most iconic. It became a global symbol of American malevolence in Iraq, as it ricocheted through the media, finding its way onto placards, T-shirts, and the walls of mosques and art galleries. But as it turned out, the prisoner who became a symbol of martyrdom — nicknamed Gilligan by his guards — had never been physically tortured, only humiliated. The crucifix-like pose had been staged for the camera. The wires were not connected to an electrical source. And Gilligan had been given the blanket with a hole cut out, like a poncho, to keep him warm, unlike many Abu Ghraib inmates who were trussed up naked in "stress positions" prescribed by military intelligence.

Other photographs taken by soldiers at Abu Ghraib in 2003 revealed far uglier horrors, including the mangled corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi detainee who was killed during a CIA investigation — an act that went unphotographed and unpunished. In a classic case of "shoot the messenger," Sabrina Harman, the U.S. soldier who photographed the corpse, and posed beside it with a smile and a raised thumb, went to jail for exposing the crime, while the interrogator who killed him has not been prosecuted.

That is a central irony that emerges from Standard Operating Procedure, an amazing documentary about the Abu Ghraib photographs that has its North American premiere at Toronto's Hot Docs festival this weekend and opens commercially next week. It comes from Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director best known for The Thin Blue Line and the The Fog of War. "Photographs reveal and they conceal," Morris told me in an interview. "You see a photograph and you think you understand what you're looking at. You think you've seen everything. But you've just seen what's in the photograph. At first I believed that Sabrina was implicated in Jamadi's death. I was wrong. I, too, was fooled by the smile. Sabrina didn't murder Jamadi. She provided evidence he'd been murdered."

In an age where nearly every soldier is armed with a digital camera, combat photography has undergone a DIY revolution. War is now being shot from the inside out. In the new home theatre of war, the mantra is point and shoot, lock and upload. Soldiers collect and swap their souvenir spoils, creating a virtual WarTube of military tourism. But the context can get lost. Exploring context is what Standard Operating Procedure is about — along with an equally devastating book of the same name that New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch co-authored with Morris.

"The Abu Ghraib photographs serve as both an exposé and a cover-up," says Morris. "They were embarrassing to the administration, to the military, to America — they were embarrassing to me. They stopped us in our tracks. If not for these photographs, many of the crimes that occurred would have remained unknown. But they didn't force us to look farther. By the end of 2003, there were 10,000 prisoners in Abu Ghraib. You're talking about a place that is immense. It's not one cellblock with a few soldiers. But you see those photographs and you think that is Abu Ghraib — "I've seen it, I know who's responsible and I know what they did!' "

Morris takes the viewer beyond the frame, weaving a forensic analysis of the photos with penetrating interviews of the soldiers who took them and posed in them. At first the meaning of the photos seems as grotesquely clear as pornography. A human pyramid of naked prisoners. A female guard with a naked man on leash. But as Morris uncovers the stories behind the images, we begin to see the guards as ordinary people trapped in an insane predicament. He argues the soldiers convicted of abuse, the so-called "bad apples," were scapegoats — punished not so much for humiliating Iraqi detainees as for humiliating the U.S. military.

You might expect that a two-hour movie documenting torture and abuse in an Iraqi hellhole would be hard to watch, or at least unpleasant. But Morris is a master of the seductive image, and what is most disturbing about Standard Operating Procedure is its eerie beauty, which feels almost perverse under the circumstances. There are three layers to the filmmaking — photo forensics, dramatic re-enactments and interviews — and they're all mesmerizing.

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