by Tom Wright

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." --George Orwell

Nearly a year has passed since the lurid photographs of Abu Ghraib first surfaced, briefly capturing the attention of the nation. Even to a public saturated by every imaginable form of transgression, the bizarre images of "Hooded Man," the piles of naked bodies and sordid sexual domination stood out, whether because they seemed like demons lurching from the Puritan unconscious, or just because they were so baldly at variance with the fairy tales through which much of the nation . . .