Tara McKelvey's account of the abuses at Agu Ghraib, in particular the abuses visited upon women prisoners, fleshes out the accounts we've read in newspapers of this scandal, and gives us personal testimony by some of the women who've been raped, as well as the first interview with Lyndie England, the woman holding the leash in one of the photographs that became infamous. That so many women who were raped and tortured at Abu Ghraib were afraid to come forward because their own families might have killed them if they'd known they were raped is among the many horrors this book reveals. That we have now become a nation whose official policy is to torture is a shame we ought all to confront, and change, and this book is an important document that every American should read.
