Mark Danner

The Twilight of Responsibility: Torture and the Higher Deniability

A riddle wrapped in mystery inside an enigma" — Churchill's comment about Soviet motivations floated into my mind as I read Philip Zelikow's elegant and powerful analysis of American "Codes of Conduct" during our Twilight War. We as Americans stand today before a terrible and indisputable fact—that, as Mr. Zelikow puts it, "for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives." And though we know an immense amount about how this came to happen—the plot lines of who did what to whom, who wrote the memos and who was "tormented" and how, who was smashed repeatedly against walls, who was crushed into tiny confinement boxes, who was waterboarded and how many times—we know relatively little about how the momentous decision came to be made.