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Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror
Includes the torture photographs in color and the full texts of the secret administration memos on torture and the investigative reports on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of "a few bad apples"? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the "war on terror"?
The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how "Hooded Man" and "Leashed Man" could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book.
These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guant‡namo "migrated" to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted.
Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here is it "is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act." For once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for our democratic Does fighting a "new kind of war" on terror justify torture? Who will we hold responsible for deciding to pursue such a policy, and what will be the moral and political costs to the country?
In the spring of 2004, graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison flashed around the world, provoking outraged debate. Did they depict the rogue behavior of "a few bad apples"? Or did they in fact reveal that the US government had decided to use brutal tactics in the "war on terror"?
The images are shocking, but they do not tell the whole story. The abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated incidents but the result of a chain of deliberate decisions and failures of command. To understand how "Hooded Man" and "Leashed Man" could have happened, Mark Danner turns to the documents that are collected for the first time in this book.
These documents include secret government memos, some never before published, that portray a fierce argument within the Bush administration over whether al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were protected by the Geneva Conventions and how far the US could go in interrogating them. There are also official reports on abuses at Abu Ghraib by the International Committee of the Red Cross, by US Army investigators, and by an independent panel chaired by former defense secretary James R. Schlesinger. In sifting this evidence, Danner traces the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guant‡namo "migrated" to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted.
Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here is it "is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and, ultimately, citizens to act." For once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for our democratic Does fighting a "new kind of war" on terror justify torture? Who will we hold responsible for deciding to pursue such a policy, and what will be the moral and political costs to the country?
608 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 2004
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About the author
Mark Danner
24 books18 followersMark David Danner is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 13, 2008
Beyond a short introduction, this is basically a document dump of the memos and position papers circulating through the Bush White House as they formulated a strategy that would unshackle what they perceived to be unnecessarily binding restrictions on the gathering of military intelligence. The Geneva Convention along with the body of international law accumulated over the centuries was all rendered "quaint" (in Alberto Gonzales' term) and obsolete in a post 9/11 world in which the US was the world's lone superpower. The shocking thing about this was the casualness with which the administration proceeded to poke around for legal loopholes to overturn established international law. Bush wanted the gloves taken off and this set in motion a coldly bureaucratic search for a solution to this problem. Moral considerations were given little to no weight, it was as if a branch manager at a Staples was given the task of increasing quarterly paper sales by 3.5%. Only instead of paper sales, these were human beings. In the case of Abu Ghraib most of the detainees had no business being there and whose presence only provided more fuel for the insurgency, which then fueled more detainments, in a closed feedback loop.
I gave this 3 stars only because of hundreds of pages of government documents with no narrative tying them together, it's unreadable for 99% of the population. It's too bad, because this is essential stuff. The media should have been much more vigilant in breaking the documents down to a level where a national discussion could have taken place. It's essential that the electorate know exactly what measures the government is taking to ensure our safety and whether those measures align with our American values and whether they are actually making us safer.
I gave this 3 stars only because of hundreds of pages of government documents with no narrative tying them together, it's unreadable for 99% of the population. It's too bad, because this is essential stuff. The media should have been much more vigilant in breaking the documents down to a level where a national discussion could have taken place. It's essential that the electorate know exactly what measures the government is taking to ensure our safety and whether those measures align with our American values and whether they are actually making us safer.
April 17, 2009
Just a reprint of his NY Review of Books articles and all of the supporting documentation.
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April 30, 2007i have to finish it
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews