The Road to Abu Ghraib

Echoing recent charges by Amnesty International, Phillip Carter argues in the Washington Monthly that the torture at Abu Ghraib was "a direct -- and predictable -- consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the [Bush] administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions."

On the brink of the election, Carter observes, "almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office."