Abu Ghraib prison, fall 2003: photographs of hooded detainees, dog leashes, and pyramids of naked bodies became the public face of the Iraq war's darkest chapter. This film goes past the official line that a handful of "bad apples" acted alone, interviewing the soldiers and military police who appear in those photographs alongside former detainees who describe what happened to them. It opens and closes with Stanley Milgram's early-1960s obedience experiments, using them to ask how ordinary young soldiers ended up carrying out systematic abuse. The film traces the paper trail upward, from memos signed by Secretary Rumsfeld and General Sanchez authorizing specific interrogation methods, to a 2003 visit by General Geoffrey Miller, who had been running the interrogation program at Guantanamo before arriving at Abu Ghraib. Justice Department opinions on permissible techniques appear alongside the soldiers' own accounts of night shifts in the cellblock. The photographs only became public because one guard liked taking pictures; the film treats that accident as the reason the story exists at all.