With the news that’s come one’s way over the past twenty-four hours about the account of Task Force 6-26 and “the Black Room,” I feel a compelling need to return to an analysis from Open Democracy that I came across recently while grading my students’ papers. (Thanks, James Cantres.) This essay was written by Hazel Carby, a leading scholar at Yale, when the pictures had first come out of Abu Ghraib:

Lynching was a tool of a racialised subjection that was frequently sanctioned by local, state and civil authority. For black Americans, lynched bodies carried an unambiguous message: any attempt to assert or claim civil rights, to seek economic, political, or social justice and equality, would be rewarded by torture and death. Lynching was also an intervention in the struggle for access to economic resources in the form of land, business and capital, and access to political power through the ballot.… The pictures of the tortured bodies of Iraqis, rather than being unique or novel, are the direct descendants of the postcards of lynched black bodies. Both are images and messages to be shared – in celebration or as a warning. The digital form in which the Abu Ghraib images circulated is new, but the message they are designed to convey is as old as racism itself: this is material evidence of the wielding of power, of the performance of conquest over an enemy.

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