Torture Expert Discusses the Exposure of Wrongdoing in Our Times

Danner, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA and the Bush administration. (His primer on the subject, "Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror," is a must for any bookshelf.) His cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume "The Massacre at El Mozote," in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where more than 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S.-trained troops during Ronald Reagan's first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, "The Secret Way to War," is due out in April....


"That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It's gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It's gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we're doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the President declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it's not the information, it's the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It's very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return."