Caroline Moorehead
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story
By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris
Picador 286pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
At the end of April 2004, the US television programme 60 Minutes and the New Yorker magazine published a number of photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. They showed an American woman soldier pulling an Iraqi prisoner on a lead, a pyramid of naked detainees, a battered corpse packed in ice and a hooded man standing on a box, his arms outstretched, apparently connected to electric wires. In the pictures the young American soldiers standing around the prisoners were grinning. Private First Class Lynndie England's smiling face as she led the crawling Iraqi became the iconic picture of the day. President Bush would later say that the day the photographs appeared was the worst of the whole Iraq war.
For what was now revealed, beyond all doubt, was that the US had indeed, as many people suspected, been conducting a dirty war in Iraq. From the moment that Iraqi prisoners were deftly turned into ‘unlawful combatants’ in a ‘war on terror’, unprotected by the Geneva Conventions (which had been
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/