I. For a long time--at least six decades--photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster--the dissemination of the photographs--rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. 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. There was also the avoidance of the word''torture.''The prisoners had possibly been the objects of''abuse,''eventually of''humiliation''--that was the most to be admitted.''My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,''Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said at a press conference.''And therefore I'm not going to address the'torture'word.''