Mark Danner speaks for us in “Torture and
Truth,” his ruminations in the current issue of The New York Review
of Books on the “Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade” by Maj. Gen.
Antonio M. Taguba and the “Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the
Treatment by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons by the
Geneva Conventions in Iraq During Arrest, Internment and Interrogation by Delegates of the
International Committee of the Red Cross”:
Many of the young Americans smiling back at us in the [Abu Ghraib]
photographs will soon be on trial. It is unlikely that those who ran “the process” and issued the
orders will face the same tribunals. Iraqis will be well aware of this, even if Americans are not.
The question is whether Americans have traveled far enough from the events of September 11 to
go beyond the photographs, which show nothing more than the amateur stooges of “the process,”
and look squarely at the process itself, the process that goes on daily at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo,
Bagram, and other secret prisons in Iraq and around the world.
Ahmed Rashid also speaks for us in “The Rise of bin Laden,” his review of “Ghost
Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden,
from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” in the previous issue of NYRB:
What successive U.S. administrations could have done to prevent September
11 will always be debatable; perhaps the failure of intelligence to anticipate it is ultimately
understandable, in view of the ponderous workings of bureaucracies. What is unforgivable is the
failure of the current U.S. administration to maintain the resources and manpower needed to
rebuild Afghanistan and to arrest bin Laden after September 11, and its decision to go to war in
Iraq instead.
