Morris says he found a willingness to abdicate personal morality in favour of "just following orders" and "doing my job". That is the mentality which enables totalitarian carnage. And the man in the black hood was tormented and photographed for fun.

In an article for the New Yorker, Morris reveals how the MPs named their victim Gilligan and that he was being "softened up" for Military Intelligence. He was hooded and draped in the blanket and made to stand on the box. His torturers included Specialist Sabrina Harman, the most prolific of the photographers.

Another noticed the cables hanging from the wall and had an idea. He checked they were dead, attached them to Gilligan's fingers, and told him to hold his arms out straight. They

made him hold the pose long enough to take the photos. "I knew he wouldn't be electrocuted so it didn't really bother me," said Harman.

Gilligan was deemed innocent and spared further torture. Harman, who mugged for the camera with mangled corpses, said: "He was just a funny, funny guy. If you were going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him."

Morris writes: "The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot ­ or do not want to ­ understand about how it came to this."