Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond.(BRIEF ENCOUNTERS)(Book review)

Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond By Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh Columbia University Press 439 pages, $29.95

ALTHOUGH THE TITLE OF this collection is not explicitly defined, in the past "administration of torture" has referred, not to bureaucratic arrangements, but to actual infliction of pain. And the United States, this black-bound volume makes clear, has inflicted a great deal of pain on its captives abroad, despite presidential denials and the government's at least rote adherence to the web of international agreements prohibiting torture. On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, staff attorneys Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh provide a compendium of truly incriminating documents, released in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and four allied organizations against the Department of Defense. The catalog--another testament to the quiet power of the Freedom of Information Act--starts with the notorious January 2002 memorandum to President Bush from White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, seeking to excuse the United States from the Geneva Conventions in handling prisoners taken in the "war on terror." It then runs through 369 pages of reproduced documents--policy memorandums, depositions, transcripts of testimony, even autopsies. Most names and many details are blacked out, but what remains is incriminating, showing that interrogators at Guantanamo, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan inflicted severe damage on prisoners that sometimes even led to their deaths--that, in short, they inflicted torture, if the term has any meaning at all. An extended introduction by Jaffer and Singh provides a guide to the documents, of which hundreds more are available on the ACLU Web site at http://www.aclu.org/ safefree/torture/torturefoia .html. One searches almost in vain for a glimmer in the darkness of this maze of quasi-sanctioned abuse and misconduct. A single exchange stands out. Following an e-mail message distributed on August 14, 2003, asserting that "The gloves are coming off ... we want these individuals broken," a lone, anonymous soul responded: "We need to take a deep breath and remember who we are.... We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there." Words, apparently, hardly anybody wanted to hear.

JAMES BOYLAN is the founding editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and professor emeritus of journalism and history at the University of Massachusetts--Amherst.