Mark Danner

Torture and Truth:
America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror

Reading /Talk/Signing

Mark Danner, a journalist who has spent time in Iraq, turns to the documents that are collected here for the first time in an attempt to understand how “Hooded Man” and “Leashed Man” could have happened at all. 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.

Danner sifts through this evidence and finds the path by which harsh methods of interrogation approved for suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Guantánamo “migrated” to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted.

Yet as Mark Danner writes, a second scandal that emerges “is not about revelation or disclosure but about the failure, once wrongdoing is disclosed, of politicians, officials, the press, and ultimately, citizens to act.” Once we know the story the photos and documents tell, we are left with the questions they pose for the future of our democratic society.

Mark Danner is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to
The New York Review of Books. He is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A
Parable of the Cold War and The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter’s Travels Through
the 2000 Florida Recount. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California
at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard
College.

Photo ©1989 Anne Hall


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