Are we there yet? 
David Simpson
- Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror by Mark Danner
- The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel Buy this book
Where does it stop? The events at Abu Ghraib prison show no signs of vanishing into historical inertia. On the contrary, they seem to be replicating themselves throughout the defenceless body politic of the ‘coalition of the willing’: even the Danes now apparently have their scandal. The photographs of British misdeeds made public after a hapless soldier took his film to be developed at a shop on his local high street have given us Camp Bread Basket, another probable icon of infamy. The photos are hard to read. Are the clenched fists and heavy boots caught in midair about to break the bones and bruise the flesh of defenceless prisoners, or are they posed for the camera in a gesture of simulated, lookalike bravado? Are they staged re-enactments of beatings that have already taken place, or prophecies of those to come? We will not know more until the court martial runs its course, and we may not know everything even then. The assessment has just begun. Meanwhile in the US the American Civil Liberties Union recently released another report listing various cases of torture and abuse, some already investigated and others, often involving the Special Forces, perhaps yet to be explored or convincingly resolved.
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David Simpson teaches English at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Wordsworth, Commodification and Social Concern will come out from Cambridge next year.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Mourning Paper · war and showing pictures of the dead
Touches of the Real · Stephen Greenblatt
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