First of all I personally gave it a 10/10 because the documentary was very moving and extremely insightful.Seeing these repulsive human beings TRYING to justify what they did is not only disturbing but begs to question what America's reel motivation is.Seeing these pathetic excuses coming out of such brainless people is seriously depressing. I totally understand not to expect much out of brainless idiots who accept to go to war for NO REASON, but this goes far beyond stupidity, this is actual cruelty..This documentary does a great job of staying out of personal and emotional opinions or reactions, no judgements are made on these knuckle dragging soldiers, which does give everyone the chance to make up their own mind, which some would say is a good thing others like myself would totally disagree. We have to educate these people not give them the possibility to take this documentary and turn it into something they can laugh about and enjoy. So following that logic I think the film makers should have voiced their disgust and shame towards these soldiers..All in all this is a very informative documentary that has much to show to the rest of the world. The biggest lesson these soldiers should take is, IF YOU REALLY THOUGHT WHAT WAS GOING ON WAS WRONG THEN DON'T PUT YOURSELF IN THAT SITUATION...It's so simple... all these excuses of the little people got thrown under the bus etc.. just doesn't fly.. STOP with the pathetic excuses that you HAD to do it.. the biggest strength is in numbers.. and by the sounds of it they "all" thought these humiliating and torturous acts were wrong.. hummm... There seems to be an error in logic there.. Either they all thought it was wrong but not wrong enough to challenge each other on such a subject. Or... They simply thought (and I use the words "simply thought" purposely) that this was acceptable....and I don't have to explain why both are DESPICABLE reasons.

This disturbing documentary causes one to ask: is the U. S. military populated by a bunch of degenerates masquerading as soldiers? Is the U. S. military depicted in this movie the same U. S. military that was welcomed as liberators during World War Two or has the U. S. military iterated to the point that it is now completely unrecognizable from its past? Abuse of authority is an old story but when it is officially sanctioned and then covered up, then that is altogether another story. Hasn't the U. S. military ever heard of the Nuremberg War Crime trial? Yet this same military directed its lowest ranking personnel to commit the grossest criminal acts and when the whole thing was uncovered refused to take responsibility, instead opting to scapegoat those who were stuck with having to carry out the orders. What kind of leadership is that? There's a saying: S%$# flows downhill and what happened at Abu Graib prison is proof of that. Where did the soldiers get the idea that you could torture prisoners? Where did that come from? What kind of culture would produce people who think that making people sexually abuse themselves is acceptable ... and then gloat about it? The photos shown in this movie speak for themselves. The United States did not fight Nazi Germany just to adopt the procedures associated with the SS, but at Abu Graib that is exactly what happened. One other thing. What this documentary reports is another example of what happens when amateurs, in this case reservists, are asked to perform military duties for this they have no training or professional experience. But even that does not explain the total breakdown in discipline and the willingness to engage in repugnant behavior that they knew was illegal and improper.

When looking at almost any photograph it is natural to wonder about the back-story, about the context in which it was taken. I think that was the motivation for this documentary, based on the infamous photos taken in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.While the investigations into the back-story of the photos out of Abu Ghraib reveal valuable insights into the horrors of that place, it is seen that extrapolating a back-story from a picture can often be misleading. For example, perhaps the most famous photo form Abu Ghraib of the guy standing on a box wearing a tattered shawl with wires dangling from his outstretched hands appears to have been staged primarily *for* the photo. He was provided the shawl since it was cold and shortly after the photos were taken the wires, which were never connected to any power source, were removed. Upon review by an investigator this procedure was viewed as "Standard Operating Procedure." What does a photo of a bloodstained floor say? Is it evidence of some horrible torture having taken place, or perhaps the blood of an insane man who was butting his head against a wall, or maybe the blood of a U.S. soldier who was shot by a prisoner using a smuggled gun? Lynndie England, the smiling young woman in so many of the photos, (like the one with her leading a prisoner on a leash) points out that the leash was slack and she was not dragging the guy and she was doing this to satisfy the desires of her lover. After seeing this film you might be more hesitant to draw conclusions based on certain photos. Of course most of the photos, such as the ones of the pyramids of nude prisoners, or the sequence of photos of the corpse of al-Jamadi, document atrocities that can hardly be explained away by any imaginable context, and such practices were indeed judged as criminal. Prison sentences were meted out to many of the soldiers involved. But the documentary makes it quite clear that only low-level soldiers were ever sentenced while it was evident that their antics were known and passed over by higher level people.I think the film succeeds in its narrow focus of trying to understand how the photos came to be and who was involved in taking them. The bulk of the documentary consists of interviews with the people most directly involved. Of course each of those people tried to put the best light on their behavior, with varying degrees of success. I felt the most successful person in this regard was Sabrina Harman whose letters home documented what she was experiencing at the time and indicated a sympathetic personality. The fact that she got sucked into this morass is disturbing. She said, "I don't know what else I could have done," and expressed regret for ever having joined the military. Director Morris lets his interviewees just talk without interjecting comments or questions. I was struck by the fact that none of them expressed any great regret or terrible guilt about what they had done, but maybe they were so traumatized by it that it was too soon for them to address that. Or maybe the environment they were operating in permitted them to rationalize that what they were doing was all right, and they have carried that attitude forward? Or maybe they were indeed uncaring jerks. But the film tries to convince you, and I think succeeds, that they were not monsters. Some of the interviewees do give evidence of having been stuck in a hell--being at the bottom of the food chain, bucking the system was not an easy option and going along with the accepted procedures was.What you seem to have had there was a bunch of young people who were in no way trained or equipped to handle what was happening. The real culprits were the interrogators who were doing the tortures and those who were establishing the procedures, and those people were not filmed. As was pointed out, if the Abu Ghraib photos had never come to light, nobody outside those involved would ever have known about this. Makes you nervous about how much we don't know.Most of the interviews are not continuous sequences but are pieced together from segments. This has he distracting effect of having the talking heads pop up at different locations on the screen during an interview. I am sure Morris could have minimized this, so I am puzzled by this decision. I have some qualms about the reenactments, but it is pretty clear what is real and what is staged. You may or may not find the ponderous musical score effective.This is a rare instance where I found the director's commentary track to be illuminating and well worth sitting through. Usually you just get things like, "It was cold the day when we shot this," or "We had to get up at 4 AM that day." Morris' commentary expands on the issues of the film and he tells what he was trying to accomplish in many of the scenes, and what he wanted to accomplish with the film in general. Also he points out things that you may have missed on first viewing. If Morris is to be believed, the tragedy of Abu Ghraib was that no valuable intelligence was extracted from any of the prisoners in this sorry affair. Saddam was apprehended by soldiers on the ground, not by intelligence.I came away from this with a different outlook than what I went in with. What more can you ask of a film?

What a crashing bore of a movie on a topic that deserved a much better treatment. Morris displays his customary heavy handedness in driving home the trivial and obvious points with excess, unneeded imagery. If you want to see a compelling story on this issue, told with much more flare and skill, see Taxi to the Dark Side. Don't waste your time on this, unless you need a good snooze. On display are Morris's usual techniques, employed to similar head-scratching ends as in Fog of War. At least there, we had an interesting character at the heart of the story and Morris lucked out with some poignant on-screen moments from McNamara. Here, he demonstrates that he has no intellectual or critical filter with which to sift facts. So, when one interviewee mentions the three cameras used to take the pictures at Abu G, we get a special effects image of each camera model floating in space as if this were some revelatory moment. When it is revealed that during an amnesty period after the Abu G scandal was revealed many photos and other documents were handed in a shredded, we get, not just a slow mo of shredded paper falling through the air, we get also get an entire cell block filled with bits of paper. In other words, every moment is punctuated with Morris's subtext: you're just too dumb to get what you just heard and I'm so enthralled with my movie making skills that I'm going to beat you over the head with this. This is not documentary film-making. This is rampant narcissism.