Monday, September 13, 2004

Torture and Responsibility (cont.)

In November 1969, Seymour M. Hersh wrote a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper articles detailing an atrocity committed by American troops in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. (The BBC noted the fortieth anniversary of the My Lai massacre with this excellent report. On the legal aspects of the My Lai trials, see this site.) The name "My Lai" is to the Vietnam War as "Abu Ghraib" is to the Iraq War: a source of shame for Americans. Hersh has been writing about Abu Ghraib for The New Yorker and was, in fact, one of the first to expose much of the story. Now his reporting is available in a just-published book entitled Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. (Some of Hersh's more recent reporting on Abu Ghraib can be read here.)