Mark Danner, The Logic of Torture. The New York Review of Books, 24 June 2004. The second of two articles. (The first of the two articles is here.) “Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability, lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States, at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners. They did this, in the felicitous phrasing of General Taguba’s report, in order to “exploit [them] for actionable intelligence” and they did it, insofar as this is possible, with the institutional approval of the United States government, complete with memoranda from the President’s counsel and officially promulgated decisions, in the case of Afghanistan and Guantanamo, about the nonapplicability of the Geneva Conventions and, in the case of Iraq, about at least three different sets of interrogation policies, two of them modeled on earlier practice in Afghanistan and Cuba.”
Torture and Truth: The Taguba Report and the Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
Mark Danner, Torture and Truth. The New York Review of Books, 10 June 2004. The first of two articles. (The second of the two articles is here.) “Abu Ghraib contained within its walls last fall [2003]—as the war heated up and American soldiers, desperate for “actionable intelligence,” spent many an autumn evening swooping down on Iraqi homes, kicking in doors, and carrying away hooded prisoners into the night—well over eight thousand Iraqis. Could it be that “between 70 percent and 90 percent” of them were “arrested by mistake”? And if so, which of the naked, twisted bodies that television viewers and news paper readers around the world have been gazing at these last weeks were among them? Perhaps the seven bodies piled up in that great coil, buttocks and genitals exposed to the camera? Or the bodies bound one against another on the cellblock floor? Or the body up against the bars, clenched before the teeth of barking police dogs?”