Posted here Friday, June 04, 2004 at 9:59:06 AM 
Time for some catching up.
Susan Sontag's article on the photos seems lasting. excerpts
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1223344,00.html
Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of distinctive policies of this administration and of the fundamental corruptions of colonial rule. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria committed identical atrocities and practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption, the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the country after its "liberation"- that is, conquest. And add to that the over-arching doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war (against a protean enemy called "terrorism"), and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides, "unlawful combatants" - a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld as early as January 2002 - and therefore, as Rumsfeld said, "technically" they "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Convention, and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges and access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attack of September 11th, 2001.
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There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time - life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? - has become a norm for millions of webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am - waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files, and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life - even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Andrew Jarecki's documentary about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges. An erotic life is, for more and more people, what can be captured in digital photographs and on video.
..........The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a direct consequence of the doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has sought to fundamentally change the domestic and foreign policy of the US. The Bush administration has committed the country to a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war - for "the war on terror" is nothing less than that...
and Elizabeth Drew in the NYRB, a good summary of the republican approach to the election.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17176
Bush has told people that he wants a "mandate" in this election to carry out his deepest wishes. If he receives one, or believes that he has received one, it is altogether likely that the environment will be further damaged, civil liberties will be further threatened, the Supreme Court will likely be set in a radically conservative direction for many years to come, and there will be a greater effort to privatize or cut social programs. The President is likely to feel that he has an even freer hand in foreign policy and in the use of military power, and less need to be accountable to Congress. For these reasons—and probably some that we can't yet imagine—this is the most consequential election in decades.
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