Whoever has seen the photo of a hooded and draped detainee of Abu Ghraib standing on a box with his arms stretched out and a wire dangling between his fingers will not forget it easily. It will remain a silent reminder of Dick Cheney’s ominous call for “the dark side” in American war on terror. It is hardly surprising to learn that much worse actually took place in the notorious Baghdad jail, and that the photos like this one were staged mainly for the jailers’ “fun,” as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris argue in their Standard Operating Procedure (London: Penguin, 2008). But it is quite surprising to read your own words about the notorious photo, which take a good part of your review of the book (“Tortured Truth,” May 17, 2008). To begin with, you reproduce it with a macabre caption: “Standing Joke.” Then you call it the “mock-execution photo” and describe the circumstances under which it was taken in graphic detail. “True,” you concede, “one of the guards had jokingly told the prisoner he might get electrocuted if he fell off the box, but no-one was sure he really believed it.” You go as far as to call all the photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib “the posed ‘fun’ bits.” What is this? A new twist on irony? Or maybe a brave foray into humor of the dark side?