Mark Danner

Tag: Publisher_TNYT
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‘Guantánamo Diary,’ by Mohamedou Ould Slahi

on or about Sept. 11, 2001, American character changed. What Americans had proudly flaunted as “our highest values” were now judged to be luxuries that in a new time of peril the country could ill afford. Justice, and its cardinal principle of innocent until proven guilty, became a risk, its indulgence a weakness. Asked recently about an innocent man who had been tortured to death in an American “black site” in Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney did not hesitate. “I’m more concerned,” he said, “with bad guys who got out and released than I am with a few that, in fact, were innocent.” In this new era in which all would be sacrificed to protect the country, torture and even murder of the innocent must be counted simply “collateral damage.

January 20, 2015
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To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature

Recovery can come only with vital, even heroic, outside help; but such help will do little to restore Haiti unless it addresses the manmade causes that lie beneath the Haitian malady.

January 21, 2010
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Tales from Torture’s Dark World

On a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

March 15, 2009
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Taking Stock of the Forever War

Seldom has an image so clearly marked the turning of the world. One of man”s mightiest structures collapses into an immense white blossom of churning, roiling dust, metamorphosing in 14 seconds from hundred-story giant of the earth into towering white plume reaching to heaven.

September 11, 2005
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We Are All Torturers Now

At least since Watergate, Americans have come to take for granted a certain story line of scandal, in which revelation is followed by investigation, adjudication and expiation.

January 6, 2005
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A Doctrine Left Behind

It seemed somehow fitting, and fittingly sad, that Colin Powell saw his resignation accepted as secretary of state on the day marines completed their conquest of Falluja

November 21, 2004
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The Struggles of Democracy and Empire

A year after a tiny band of religious zealots managed with stunning audacity to mutilate the face of America, the world’s sole superpower trembles on the threshold of a new imperial season.

October 8, 2003
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The Battlefield in the American Mind

In Afghanistan, the targets are running out. Such are the frustrations of the powerful; Joseph Conrad, writing of an African “heart of darkness” a century ago, well understood: “Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast.

October 16, 2001
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Members of the Club

Six decades ago, in a classroom at Groton, a young man rose slowly to his feet, gazed down at a sheaf of papers in his hand, and began to read.

April 4, 1999
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To Haiti, With Love and Squalor

Driving south in Haiti one day in the spring of 1986, I passed a great 18-wheeled tractor-trailer speeding north, heard a volley of automatic weapons fire, and, craning my neck to look back, witnessed an absurd and amazing tableau…

August 11, 1991

Rescuing a Tattered Word–‘liberal’

Having ferreted out the ”sophisticated rebels” of Europe from Cardiff to Cracow, H. Stuart Hughes found himself rather nonplussed when asked to suggest their counterparts in the United States.

January 8, 1989