Sontag on Abu Ghraib: Susan Sontag writes on images of torture in today's Guardian:

[T]here seems no reversing for the moment America's commitment to self-justification, and the condoning of its increasingly out-of-control culture of violence. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamour to get on a television show to reveal.

She also writes that the "administration's initial response was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs--as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict," an opinion back up by this fact: Rumsfeld has reportedly instituted a military-wide ban on digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras.

Also: Sontag's Regarding the Torture of Others from yesterday's New York Times Magazine.