Abu Ghraib, WMD, Downing Street and the Age of No-Fault Scandal

[swag]

Mark Danner, June 23, 2005 NYRB

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=18094
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What distinguishes our time – the time of September 11 – is the end of the narrative of scandal. With the scandals over weapons of mass destruction and Abu Ghraib, we are stuck at step one. We have had the revelation; we know about the wrong-doing. Just recently, in the Downing Street memo, we had an account of a high-level discussion in Britain, nearly eight months before the Iraq war, in which the head of British intelligence flatly tells the prime minister -- the intelligence officer has just returned from Washington – that not only has the President of the United States decided that “military action was …inevitable” but that – in the words of the British intelligence chief – “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around policy.” This memo has been public for weeks.

So we have had the revelations; we know what happened. What we don’t have is any clear admission of – or adjudication of – guilt, such as a serious congressional or judicial investigation would give us, or any punishment. Those high officials responsible are still in office. Indeed, not only have they received no punishment, many have been promoted. And we – you and I, members of the reality-based community – we are left to see, to be forced to see. And this, for all of us, is a corrupting, a maddening, but also an inescapable burden.

(Mark Danner, “What Are You Going to Do with That?” New York Review of Books, June 23, 2005, Page 52. From a commencement address by Danner, given to graduating English students, Cal Berkeley, May 15, 2005.)