grew to cult status with The Thin Blue Line in 1988, credited with solving the murder of a policeman and saving an innocent man from the electric chair.

The film critic Roger Ebert says: "Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini." But because his work has been in documentaries,

Morris has made ends meet with adverts for clients like Apple Computer. He is married to an art historian, has one son and lives near Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Standard Operating Procedure is the military euphemism for what went on at Abu Ghraib. By collecting hundreds of the photographs taken by the men and women of 372nd Military Police Company, the notorious Lynndie England among them, and recording a million and a half words in interviews, Morris has peered behind the face-value horror of torture.

He discovered a degree of personal ignorance and poor training that made flouting the Geneva Convention easy. The MPs found it hilarious when a bullying sergeant chained a man "like Jesus" and "poked at his dick".