| In the winter of 2004, Antonio M. Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote an incendiary report. In the course of fifty-three pages, Taguba described “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” that had been carried out by Americans at Abu Ghraib. The site, an infamous Iraqi prison during Saddam Hussein’s rule, had stood empty after the previous year’s invasion, but it was then refurbished and returned to use by the U.S.-led coalition. Taguba’s findings weren’t intended for the public. The public found out anyway. Twenty years ago this week, The New Yorker published extensive details from the investigation, helping set off a scandal that reverberated nationally and around the world. In a bombshell article, the staff writer Seymour M. Hersh described physical, mental, and sexual torture that had taken place at the prison, revealing the role of American soldiers, officers, and private contractors as both active participants and as observers who knew and looked the other way. Some of the perpetrators had documented their own crimes with photos and video; The New Yorker published two haunting images, though not the most graphic. Decades earlier, Hersh had won a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers in My Lai, a revelation that changed the course of the war. In his exposé about Abu Ghraib, Hersh named men and women behind the abuse, but he also identified Specialist Joseph M. Darby, who brought the episode to light. Darby “initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement,” a military-court witness recalled. “He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.” | 
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