Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of three books: The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War; The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels Through the 2000 Florida Recount; and Torture and Truth. Danner's work has been honored with many awards, including a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In June 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. 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. He divides his time between Berkeley and New York. His work is archived at markdanner.com. »

Torture and Truth

America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror

By Mark Danner

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 Guantánamo "migrated" to Iraq as resistance to the US occupation grew and US casualties mounted.

Yet as Mark Danner writes, the real scandal here is political: 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 society: 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?

Table of Contents

Reviews

An invaluable resource...far more durable and available than any series of virtual documents on the web.
— David Simpson, London Review of Books

Danner's engrossing analysis and painstaking scholarship may yet bring a measure of justice to the thousands of innocent Iraqis tortured in the cause of freedom and democracy.
— Bill McSweeney, Irish Times

Mark Danner —toiling through official reports and transcripts...has exposed the false piety in disavowals of responsibility by Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, and established official complicity in the abuser.
— Peter Conrad, Observer

...A reprint of some of the most important items in the historical record, an invitation to read the small print that prefigured and followed on the scenes now embedded in our memory and reproduced all over the world as icons of the Coalition's cruelty and hypocrisy.... By offering themselves for slow reading and rereading, they also open up for discussion some of the deeper issues governing the way we perpetrate and respond to conduct that many of us consider inhuman and appalling. Among these issues is the language we use, and its consequences not just for others but for ourselves.
— London Review of Books

Mark Danner—toiling through official reports and transcripts of interviews with prisoners and witnesses, as well as conducting his own investigation in Iraq—has exposed the false piety in disavowals of responsibility by Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, and established official complicity in the abuse.
— The Observer (London)

The documents, some of which are published for the first time in Torture and Truth, make for gripping, if disturbing, reading.
— Mother Jones

...A book of permanent value for the study of the Iraq war and of how apparently reasonable policies can be swept away by intense pressure, political or military, to produce a particular result.... Abu Ghraib raises issues that will form part of the debate on American military policy long after Iraq is out of the headlines; at the very least, this book provides the information necessary for the public's involvement in that discussion.
— Publishers Weekly

Danner has performed a real public service with this collection and with his trenchant analysis of the material in the included articles for The New York Review of Books.
— Foreign Affairs

Danner's book does a fine job assembling [a collection of the relevant sources], from the Taguba report to the Justice Deparment’s memoranda and opinions—one of which became so notorious for giving the president power to use coercive force that it is now often simply known as the 'Torture Memo'.
— The Washington Post Book World

...Despite the dereliction of network news and the subterfuge of the Bush administration, the information is all there in black and white, if not in video or color, for those who want to read it, whether in the daily press or in books like...Mark Danner's Torture and Truth.
— Frank Rich, The New York Times

Also see:

The Secret Way To War By Mark Danner Preface by Frank Rich An award-winning investigative journalist evaluates the controversial American and British stratagem for the Iraq war.

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