Here's a troubling question that hangs over the Abu Ghraib story: if you look happy when you torment your prisoners is it worse than if you look unhappy about it -- grim, or at least dour?

Appearances matter, for better or worse, and certainly, the more unseemly a criminal's demeanor the more easily and absolutely we revile his actions. The Book Club commenter who calls himself Munguza argues that much of the public outrage over the Abu Ghraib photographs was provoked by the fact that some of the soldiers in some of the pictures "apparently enjoyed brutally abusing Iraqi prisoners," and "indulged in deliberate, premeditated mistreatment as a form of entertainment."

I address this issue in a number of passages in Standard Operating Procedure, and while I was writing the book, I kept a file, which I called "The Pleasure Problem," in which I compiled the following quotations that didn't make it into the book from Errol's interviews with American military officers:

General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of detention operations in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib photos, said: "The expressions on soldiers' faces, on Graner's face, on Lynndie England's face, on other soldiers' faces, was what stayed with me. The dangling cigarette. The smile. The thumbs up. What kind of an idiot commits a crime and puts themselves in a picture for evidence of committing that crime?"

Major David DiNenna,, who was the MP operations chief at the prison in the fall of 2003, said: "I think that's what angers me the most, is that there was some type of pleasure in doing this."

Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, the MP officer in charge of the day shift on the Military Intelligence block of the Abu Ghraib hard site in the fall of 2003, said: "Let's just say if I wanted to just outright fuck with some detainees, you know, I'm going to hang them upside down by the toenails and use the old Chinese tickle torture on them -- do I go have a camera because I want to document this? You know, I don't think that I would be stupid enough to share that with anyone. That would probably just go in my private memoirs or something, just for me to be having some shits and giggles, you know? But for whatever reason, they took the pictures and from what I understand, they were passing them around, I guess, showing folks or whatever and making copies and stuff, passing them around like Christmas cards. I just don't understand the thinking behind that. You know, it was strange. I'm just dumbfounded by it ... And, quite frankly, I had no desire to keep any kind of memories of that job, I really didn't. If I could, I'd erase all memory of it right now, you know? Just hit the delete button." So for Joyner the issue wasn't whether the soldiers looked happy for the cameras - it was that the cameras were there at all: "You posed for pictures!" he said. "Next to bungee jumping, that is the dumbest thing I've ever seen."

Sergeant Javal Davis, the only one of the "bad apples" who served jail time for his participation in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib but who never appeared in any pictures of the abuse, said: "It made me sick - but the mugging at the camera, from a person not being there, it's hard to judge because you don't know what these people were thinking at that moment... It was that twisted, you know, the mind was that jaded, you don't know what's going on. The only judgment that I pass is I wish they would have made little better decisions with the camera and not take pictures of things like that. Don't get involved in stuff like that because that's not our job, that's a little too deep. Well, in the military we say "not our lane."

Special Agent Brent Pack, the director of digital forensics at the Army's Criminal Investigative Division whose testimony in courts martial helped to convict the "bad apples", said: I think Graner was not unjustly prosecuted. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed what he did. That should never happen... You should not take pleasure in other people's pain. I don't care what job you do."

Specialist Megan Ambuhl - now Mrs. Megan Graner - the only one of the "bad apples" who did not get sentenced to jail time: "Sometimes, yes, we laughed about it or sometimes we smiled or sometimes -- you can't always be, you know, serious every minute and, you know, always stoic or whatever you want to call it. Or you're going to have a hard time dealing, coping with the situation you're put in. Because that was a pretty -- that's not a situation you would ever expect to be in or hope to be in or, you know. It's just way out of the realm of possibility. And, you know, a lot of people do smile for cameras. It's a natural reaction. So that can be part of it, too.

In fact, of the hundres of photographs taken of prisoner abuse on the Military Intelligence block at Abu Ghraib, only a couple of dozen depict soldiers who are smiling or appear to be taking pleasure. And it's impossible to guess from the pictures, whether these smiles were a response to the abuse - candidly captured by the cameras - or whether they were a response to the camera. When one fills in the context of the pictures from soldiers' testimonies it becomes clear that a great deal of the smiling and mugging was for the camera - consistent with the manner of posing that the same soldiers fell into in their "happy snaps" of each other at other times and places, with no prisoners around. (Errol Morris has written at length on his NY Times blog about Sabrina Harman's smile, and how - according to the leading expert on facial expressions - it is not a smile of pleasure.)

All the same, there's no doubt: appearing to enjoy the abuse became a large part of the offense of the "bad apples" who were convicted on the basis of the photographs they took of themselves mandhandling, mocking and sexually humiliating prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The handful of photographs that seemed to show soldiers having pleasure while tormenting the prisoners commanded an inordinate amount of space in the press, while many far more disturbing images of greater abuse - the dogs lunging and tearing at the flesh of naked cowering prisoners, for instance - seemed to register a lesser shock. What's more, some of the saddest, most soul-crushing pictures from Abu Ghraib show no soldiers at all - but are portraits of prisoners, stripped and shackled in painful stress positions and left, hooded by a sanbag or a pair of panties, by themselves, in solitude. But these pictures, like the dog pictures, and like all that was criminal about Abu Ghraib that went unphotographed, never seemed to capture the public's imagination or spark its outrage and indignation at anything like the level of the "happy snaps" of torture with grinning Americans.

Those smiles and grins, whatever they signified - sadism or a reflexive response to the camera (compare the grin and thumbs up of President Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln when he landed to give his "mission accomplished" speech on May 1, 2003)... Those smiles and grins created an enormous distraction from the larger story of systemic abuse, and focused our attention on the individual actors at Abu Ghraib. The expressions of apparent pleasure in torture, coupled with the fact that these photographs were clearly some sort of souvenir trophy photographs, made it all too easy to see the photographs - pictures that were most usefully understood as photographs of US policy, as dictated from on high - merely as images of private depravity. In this way, the kinky surface of those smiles eclipsed our outrage at the depths of the problem, and made it so much easier to scapegoat a few low ranking reservists, while their unsmiling superiors up the chain of command skated away without being held to account.

So, I come back to the question I started with here: Is my crime really greater if I appear to take pleasure in it? Only this time let me pose the question the other way around: Is my crime really lesser, is it somehow mitigated and is your outrage somehow mollified, if I appear to take no pleasure in it?

Because that seems to be how we responded to the photographic evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib. You could get the sense that there was more distress about the pictures than about the things they depicted.