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This chapter elaborates the book’s argument about morality and ethics by discussing documentaries and fictional dramas about torture and the ‘War on Terror’, including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), and Standard Operating Procedure (2008). It argues that Zero Dark Thirty adheres to a moral script about 9/11 and its aftermath, justifying the self-appointed forces of good going over to ‘the dark side’. By constructing such a moral universe, the film helps to normalise torture and other illicit practices, making them acceptable. Taxi to the Dark Side creates another kind of moral universe, inspiring pity for the dark side’s victims and outrage towards the policy’s architects. However, Standard Operating Procedure, though criticised for its lack of moral perspective, stands out as the most ‘ethical’ of these films, as it engages us at multiple, sensory levels and explores how moral norms are reconstructed in the ‘atrocity-producing situation’.

This chapter analyzes the 1965 feature film The Battle of Algiers, which dramatized an episode in the Algerian War during which torture was systematically used in the dismantling of an urban guerilla network operating out of the Casbah, the old city. More specifically, it explores the uncertainties and silences surrounding the filmic treatment of torture, as well as its garbled or ambiguous meanings as conveyed in The Battle of Algiers and the documentaries Standard Operating Procedure and Taxi to the Dark Side. It argues that The Battle of Algiers failed to capture the centrality of torture in the French counterinsurgency effort in Algeria, while Standard Operating Procedure minimizes the effects of torture on the Abu Ghraib detainees and does not represent the victims’ suffering or experience. Taxi to the Dark Side discloses the extent of America’s torture program, elucidates the decisions that made torture a key element in the country’s counterinsurgency program in Iraq and Afghanistan, and gives the torture victims a voice.

This chapter analyzes the documentaries Standard Operating Procedure and The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, arguing that both failed to adequately capture the humanity and the dilemmas of victims and perpetrators at Abu Ghraib. In the Operation Iron Triangle killings of 2006 and the Baghdad Canal killings of 2007, several distinct and interesting patterns regarding torture, abuse, killing, and the treatment of prisoners can be identified. The common strand that binds these cases together is that of a scientifically designed stage for sadism established by the government, followed by an equally scientific system designed to shift blame onto the lowest-ranking soldiers while protecting the power elite. The chapter suggests that Standard Operating Procedure and The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib both avoid framing the abuse and torture as official government policy and instead focus on the enlisted “bad apples,” minimizing the role played by the commanding officers.

This chapter discusses the changing status of the image in relation to the infamous digital photographs of torture that emerged from Abu Ghraib, and their exploration in Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008). Both this film and the director’s subsequent The Unknown Known (Errol Morris, 2013) investigate the ways in which media create and shape our perception of the event ‘torture at Abu Ghraib’ and the role played by language in this process.