Every photograph records an event. But the Abu Ghraib photographs are an event in themselves. In this, they join a long and ignoble line of photographs-including those of lynching carnivals in the American South, and those taken in too many European countries during the Nazi period-that not only depict cruelty but celebrate it. The behavior these photographs document is bad, but it is the very fact that the photographs were made, and the happiness of the tormentors that they show, that disorients us. Civilization isn't contingent on the hope that people will never harm each other-if it were, there would be no civilization anywhere on Earth; but it does assume, at least implicitly, that people will be ashamed, and fear the consequences, of the hurtful acts they commit. When that shame and fear are lacking, we all feel threatened. For how can we trust a world in which my pain, or yours, is the pride and joy of another, and where impunity reigns?

Millions of people throughout th...

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