When the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in April 2004, Americans and the rest of the world were stunned. President George W. Bush condemned the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers and blamed it on a few bad apples who, he said, had "dishonored our country and disregarded our values." Mark Danner, a journalist with
The New Yorker, argues that a key fact was lost amid the media coverage: the torture was part of a deliberate policy of "enhanced interrogation" planned at the highest levels of the administration. But no punishment awaits the senior U.S. officials who orchestrated the abuses in Iraq and other U.S. detention facilities around the world, Danner writes. With the help of a Republican-controlled Congress, the White House and Defense Department have so far succeeded in limiting the fallout from the scandal and blaming it on a handful of overzealous, low-ranking soldiers.
Danner's 580-page book is divided into three parts. The first consists of three essays he wrote on the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. In them, he cites U.S. military personnel who estimate that 70 to 95 percent of the Iraqis they arrested were detained by mistake. Most were nabbed in night-time "cordon and capture" sweeps and had no intelligence value. Yet, military intelligence soldiers, under enormous pressure to combat a mounting Iraqi insurgency, worked with military police to squeeze "actionable intelligence" out of the detainees. The soldiers urinated on prisoners, threatened to rape them, sodomized them with sticks and chemical lights, deprived them of sleep, beat, kicked, and slapped them, and restricted their breathing with hoods. The rest of Danner's book consists of other essays he wrote about the war in Iraq, photos of the abuses and the texts of official reports and memos that, in grim detail, catalog both the torture and the U.S. policies that made it possible. Abu Ghraib, Danner writes, is just the tip of the iceberg. --Alex Roslin
This stout and valuable instant book presents a documentary history of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-torture scandal. The paper trail includes policy statements concerning prisoner treatment signed by Attorney General Ashcroft and President Bush, reports on prisoner mistreatment generated within the United States armed forces themselves and material (including photographs) from outside agencies. The sheer mass of data requires some background knowledge about the military and the situation, if only to free the reader from dependence on the author's commentary, although New Yorker staff writer Danner (The Massacre at El Mozote) was in Iraq during 2003, and his opinions, when they come to the fore, are backed up with observations. While the publisher admits to having rushed the book into print, it emerges as 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.
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Review
"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
"An invaluable resource…far more durable and available than any series of virtual documents on the web."
— David Simpson, London Review of Books
"...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
"Danner’s book does a fine job assembling [a collection of the relevant sources], from the Taguba report to the Justice Department’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
"The documents, some of which are published for the first time in Torture and Truth, make for gripping, if disturbing, reading."
— Mother Jones
"…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
"Mr. Danner’s book is valuable because to the 50 pages of articles he originally wrote for The New York Review of Books, the volume adds hundreds of pages of the relevant Justice and Defense Department memorandums, the photos, prisoners’ depositions, Red Cross reports and the military’s own major investigations of Abu Ghraib. Motivated readers can judge for themselves."
— Peter Steinfels, The New York Times
"Every bit as important as the 9/11 Commission’s report."
— Sanford Levinson, The Los Angeles Times
"Danner has compiled excellent documents on the abuse of prisoners of Abu Ghraib…Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."
— Choice
"[Danner] begins with passionate essays that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, but very soon [he] leaves the stage and lets the documents speak for themselves….If you read it in the order Danner provides, you can see exactly how this horror came about—and why it’s still going on. As Danner observes, this is a scandal with almost everything in plain sight."
— Andrew Sullivan, The New York Times Book Review
"Danner’s…essays…reveal a keen mind at work and warn us to expect little serious congressional investigation into one of the great foreign policy disasters in our lives."
— The Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. He is Chancellor’s Professor of English, Journalism and Politics at the University of California at Berkeley and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities at Bard College and is currently teaching at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. His book Torture and the Forever War will be published in the spring of 2013. His writing and other work can be found at markdanner.com.
