Current Affairs: It's a popular cliché of cinema. We hear the clock ticking and watch the seconds register the approaching catastrophe. The scene shifts abruptly to the interrogation room.
The only man who knows the location of the bomb is strapped to a chair. He is asked one last time and refuses to tell. Who would be so stupid as to worry about the UN Convention Against Torture in such a case?
As the military bases in Afghanistan filled with anyone who looked like the Taliban and the package tours to Cuba flew their bemused clientele into purpose-built cages in Guantánamo Bay, the debate on torture began to sort the pragmatists from the squeamish. And the ticking bomb hypothesis became the argument of first resort.
Otherwise decent humanists such as the late Alastair Cooke and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz joined the ranks of notables who used it to argue that the legal prohibition on torture - the infliction of severe pain whether physical or mental - did not apply to the Bush administration's war on terror. Never mind that it was drafted precisely to apply to the extraordinary conditions of war. The attack on the Twin Towers changed everything. There were ticking bombs everywhere now, and the fact of being a hooded Arab shackled in a cage with military interrogators was evidence enough for the pragmatists to get tough.
When the revelations of cruelty were investigated by the US Congress last April, some of the nation's highest-level officials were questioned, up to and including secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld. Now Mark Danner, professor of journalism at the University of California, has gathered a sizeable quantity of the official documents compiled during this inquiry, and added his own five chapters of commentary on the scandal that rocked the US for a time. Danner's essays are followed by three collections of appendices relating to the internal US debate about torture, the prisoners' stories, and the text of official reports on the abuse.
If the scandal has so far failed to touch the higher ranks of the military and government who are surely implicated, according to the author, Danner's engrossing analysis and painstaking scholarship may yet bring a measure of justice to the thousands of innocent Iraqis tortured in the cause of freedom and democracy. (The cause will be helped by the appearance at the same time of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, published by Cambridge University Press and edited by Greenberg and Dratel - a massive compendium of memos and documents covering the same topic in greater detail.)
Six months after the end of the war in Iraq, Abu Ghraib prison held more than 8,000 Iraqis. Military intelligence later estimated that 70-90 per cent of them were innocent. Like Hayder Abd, a Shia from Nassiriya, picked up on the street on grounds that were never revealed; he was never charged, just tortured for information he never had. His photograph is reproduced in the book, naked, held on a dog leash by a female guard who points delightedly to his genitals. Later, he reported, his hood was removed and he was ordered to masturbate while the guard put her hands on her breasts. When he couldn't do it he was beaten. "So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending."
One prisoner was stripped naked and hooded for days. Then " . . . two of the American soldiers brought me to the ground and tied my hands to the door while laying down on my stomach. One of the police was pissing on me and laughing on me . . . And one of the police he put a part of his stick that he always carries inside my ass and I felt it going inside me about two centimetres, approximately. And I started screaming . . . And when I was tied up in my room, one of the girls, with blonde hair, she is white, she was playing with my dick . . . And they were taking pictures of me during all these instances". The joke which Danner heard earlier in Baghdad was not so funny after all. "I always knew the Americans would bring electricity back to Baghdad. I just never thought they'd be shooting it up my ass."
Danner asks whether the guards' obsession with sodomy and sexual humiliation was restricted to a group of sadists in that particular prison or cell-block, allowing the Pentagon to claim that a few deviants had besmirched the honour of the military. But his inquiries show a similar pattern of cruelty in another prison where Iraqi Reuters' journalists, filming a downed US helicopter, were dragged into a forwarding base near Fallujah. In freezing cold, they reported, they were forced to kneel with their feet off the ground, raise one hand in the air idiot-style and with the other contrive to lick their own excrement.
From the author's analysis of the evidence collected in the appendices, it appears that the infamous Pte Lynndie England and her colleagues were dancing to a tune written by desk officers in the higher ranks of the military. The instructions "to manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses" and to "intensify guilt feeling" were couched in deniable code thousands of miles from the front line of combat. They were translated into plainer English by local interrogators in terms which the pathetic England could grasp: "Loosen this guy up for us. Make sure he has a bad night."
The Pentagon has managed so far to fix public attention on the photographs themselves and the "bad apples" who posed for them, and to divert the investigations away from the higher echelons of military authority. But Danner is convinced that the permissive context for their sadism was facilitated at the highest level by the legal euphemisms of White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who advised and answered directly to the president.
Gonzales had rubbished as "quaint" and "outdated" the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. In August 2002, he solicited a memo from the head of the office of legal counsel - reproduced by Danner - on the meaning of torture and the limits of presidential authority. Written by Jay S. Bybee, it duly obliged by redefining torture as "physical injury such as organ failure . . . or even death", and declaring that the president's authority as commander-in-chief cannot be limited in "such core war matters as the detention and interrogation of enemy combatants."
When asked at a press conference during the congressional investigation into Abu Ghraib last year "Is torture ever justified?", President Bush replied tetchily: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time . . . The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you."
It certainly seems to have comforted the president's legal advisers. Jay S. Bybee has just been promoted to a lifetime appointment as judge of the 9th Circuit Court, and Alberto Gonzales has now been confirmed as the new attorney general of the United States.
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, By Mark Danner, Granta, 573pp. £16.99
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin