Torture and the Forever War

Describing the unfolding torture of Guantanamo detainee Abu Zabaydah, Mark Danner
paints a vivid portrait with unsettling bodily and material details. But this portrait is not
presented simply for us to condemn; it serves to crystallize a larger political condition. Sometime
on or about September 11, 2001, Danner argues, our political condition changed. The events of
Zabaydah's torture were the consequence of a set of political choices that created what Danner calls
"the style of the exception." That style coalesces around distinctive features that have
become familiar in our post-9/11 world and have not changed in a new administration: a declaration
of an unending war against an enemy positioned outside the bounds of all legality; a war guided by a
legally unbounded executive, who controls the public release of information and uses partisan
domestic politics as a continuation of the war by other means, in an improvisational style, and
without guidance from history or legal constraints.But in describing this new
condition, Danner's most pressing concern is not to place blame. Those who created the style of the
exception, he argues, surely knew that a moment of judgment would come. Could it be that they
thought we would affirm the rightness of their choices, and that in identical circumstances we would
have done the same thing?Danner invites us to consider how, if we reject those
choices now, we might extricate ourselves from the style of the exception.