Mark Danner

Mark Danner
Born	10 November 1958 (1958-11-10) (age 53) Utica, New York, USA
Occupation	Author, journalist, professor
Website
www.markdanner.com

Mark David Danner (born November 10, 1958) is a prominent American writer, journalist, and educator. He is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Danner specializes in U.S. foreign affairs, war and politics, and has written extensively on Haiti, Central America, the former Yugoslavia, and the Middle East. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.^[1]

He is currently serving as a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.^[2]

Background and education

Danner was born at Utica, New York. He attended Utica Free Academy, a public high school, and then Harvard, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a degree in modern literature and aesthetics in 1981.^[3]

Career

Early years

After leaving Harvard, Danner joined the staff of The New York Review of Books, where he worked as an assistant to editor Robert B. Silvers from 1981 to 1984.^[4] In 1984, he moved to Harper's Magazine as a senior editor. In 1986, he joined The New York Times Magazine, where he specialized in foreign affairs and politics, writing pieces about nuclear weapons and about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, among other stories.

The New Yorker and El Mozote

In 1990, Danner joined the staff of The New Yorker shortly after the magazine published his three-part series on Haiti, "A Reporter at Large: Beyond the Mountains".

On December 6, 1993, for only the second time in its history, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to one article, Danner's piece, "The Truth of El Mozote", an investigation into the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, thought to be the worst atrocity in modern Latin American history. The Mozote article became the basis for Danner's first book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War, which was published in 1994. The New York Times Book Review recognized The Massacre at El Mozote as one of its "Notable Books of the Year."^[5]

The Balkans and The New York Review of Books

During the mid-1990s Danner began reporting on the wars in the Balkans, writing a series of eleven extended articles for The New York Review of Books, which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe" (November 20, 1997) and concluded with "Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory", (July 15, 1999).

His 16,000-word essay, "Marooned in the Cold War: America, the Alliance and the Quest for a Vanished World," which appeared in World Policy Journal (Fall 1997) provoked a prolonged exchange of letters and responses from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, and Ambassador George F. Kennan.

Iraq and the War on Terror

Danner began writing about the war on terror soon after September 11, 2001, publishing ""The Battlefield in the American Mind" in the New York Times in October of that year. He began speaking out against invading Iraq, notably in a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Frum, William Kristol and others.^[6] He reported from Iraq for The New York Review of Books in a series of lengthy dispatches including "Iraq: How Not to Win a War"(September 25, 2003), "Delusions in Baghdad" (February 12, 2004), and ""The War of the Imagination" (December 21, 2006).

In May 2005 Danner wrote an essay for The New York Review accompanying the first American publication of the so-called "Downing Street Memo", the leaked minutes of a July 2002 meeting the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of high-level British officials confirmed that when it came to the debate over whether to go to war in Iraq, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," and that the invasion of Iraq was in fact a foregone conclusion. The essay provoked a number of responses and led to two subsequent essays, all of which were collected, along with relevant documents and a preface by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, 2006 in The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History.

Torture and Abu Ghraib

Beginning in the spring of 2004, he wrote a series of essays for The New York Review on the emerging torture scandal that came to be known as Abu Ghraib. In October 2004, he collected these essays and gathered them, together with a series of government documents and reports, into his book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.

In March 2009, Danner published an essay in The New York Review,' "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites", which revealed the contents of a secret International Committee of the Red Cross report based on testimony from "high-value detainees" in the "War on Terror," who had been captured, held, and interrogated at secret US prisons—the so-called "black sites". Shortly thereafter, he published a second essay, "The Red Cross Report: What it Means' and released the full text of the report on The New York Review website. Weeks later, President Obama ordered released four Justice Department memos in which the Bush administration purported "to legalize torture." Senior Obama officials claimed that the memos' release was prompted by the Red Cross Report.^[7]

Other works

Books

In addition to The Massacre at El Mozote (1994), Torture and Truth (2004), and The Secret Way to War (2006), Danner is also the author of The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels through the 2000 Florida Recount (2003) and Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War (2009).

Television and Commentary

Danner co-wrote and helped produce two hour-long television documentaries for ABC News' Peter Jennings Reporting series: "While America Watched: The Bosnian Tragedy" and "House on Fire: America's Haitian Crisis", which both aired in 1994. As commentator, Danner has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour and Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, CNN's Prime News, Situation Room, and Anderson Cooper 360 ABC's World News Now, C-Span's Morning Show, and The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.

Academic career

In 2000 Danner became Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2002 he also accepted a Henry R. Luce professorship in Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, where, in 2006, he was named the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities. At Berkeley, where he is now Chancellor's Professor of Journalism and Politics, he teaches on foreign affairs, politics, and literature, including on war and revolution, crisis management, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky. At Bard he conducts seminars on politics and literature, including on torture, utopia, Faust, the picaresque, and the politics of the War on Terror.^[8] In April 2010, Danner delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, entitled "Torture and the Forever War: Living in the State of Exception."^[9]

Honors and awards

Danner’s work has been honored with a National Magazine Award, three Overseas Press Awards, and an Emmy. In 1999, he was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2006 he was awarded the Carey McWilliams Award to honor that year's "major journalistic contribution to our understanding of politics."^[10] In 2008 and 2010 he was named the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Visiting Critic at the American Academy in Rome.

Bibliography

Books

• Danner, Mark (1994). The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. New York: Vintage. ISBN 067975525X. 
• Danner, Mark (2004). The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Travels through the 2000 Florida Vote Recount. New Jersey: Melville House. ISBN 9780974960968. 
• Danner, Mark (2004). Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9780679415329. 
• Danner, Mark (2006). The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 9781590172070. 
• Danner, Mark (2009). Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War. New York: Nation Books. ISBN 15685813X. 

Essays

• Danner, Mark (November 27, 1989). "Haiti: Beyond the Mountains". The New Yorker. http://markdanner.com/articles/show/93. 
• Danner, Mark (December 4, 1997). "America and the Bosnia Genocide". The New York Review of Books. http://markdanner.com/articles/show/60. 
• Danner, Mark (October 16, 2001). "The Battlefield in the American Mind". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/16/opinion/the-battlefield-in-the-american-mind.html. 
• Danner, Mark (October 9, 2002). "The Struggles of Democracy and Empire". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/09/opinion/the-struggles-of-democracy-and-empire.html. 
• Danner, Mark (October 7, 2004). "Abut Ghraib: The Hidden Story". The New York Review of Books. http://markdanner.com/articles/show/60. 
• Danner, Mark (September 11, 2005). "Taking Stock of the Forever War". New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11OSAMA.html. 
• Danner, Mark (December 21, 2006). "Iraq: The War of the Imagination". The New York Review of Books. http://markdanner.com/articles/show/129. 
• Danner, Mark (April 9, 2009). "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites". The New York Review of Books. http://markdanner.com/articles/show/us_torture_voices_from_the_black_sites. 
• Danner, Mark (October 21, 2010). "To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22danner.html. 

Lectures and Interviews

• Mark Danner (February 26, 2006) (transcript). You Can Do Anything With a Bayonet Except Sit on It. Interview with Tom Engelhardt. Tomdispatch.com. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/63903. 
• Mark Danner (November 14, 2006) (video). The Politics of the Forever War: Terror, Rights, and George Bush's State of Exception. lecture. 2006 Remarque Lecture at NYU. http://vimeo.com/1300220. 
• Mark Danner (March 15, 2009) (audio). Author Sheds Light on CIA's 'Black Sites'. Interview with Jacki Lyden. All Things Considered. NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101926766. 
• Mark Danner (October 16, 2009) (video/transcript). Obama and America in the World. Interview with Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers Journal. PBS. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10162009/profile.html. 

Anthologies and Introductions

• Schmertz, Eric J. et al, eds. (1997). President Reagan and the World. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313301158. 
• Towell, Larry (introduction by Mark Danner) (1997). El Salvador: Photographs by Larry Towell. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393039447. 
• Buckley, William J. (editor) (2000). Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions. New York: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 0802838898. 
• Danner, Mark, et al. (2003). Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology. New York: Blackwell Readers in Anthropology. ISBN 0631223487. 
• Levi Strauss, David (editor) (2004). Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. ISBN 1556435509. 
• Engelhardt, Tom (editor) (2006). Mission Unaccomplished: TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. New York: Nation Books. ISBN 1560259388. 
• Flippin, Royce (editor) (2006). Best American Political Writing 2006. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 9781560259121. 
• Wallace, David Foster (editor) (2007). Best American Essays 2007. New York: Mariner Books. ISBN 0618709274. 
• Szanto, Andras (editor) (2007). What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 1586485601. 
• Engelhardt, Tom (editor) (2008). The World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire. New York: Verso. ISBN 9781844672578. 
• Silvers, Robert B. (editor) (2008). The Consequences to Come: American Power After Bush. New York: New York Review Books. ISBN 1590172981. 
• de Segur, Phillipe-Paul (introduction by Mark Danner) (2008). Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign. New York: NYRB Classics. ISBN 1590172825. 
• Flippin, Royce (editor) (2009). Best American Political Writing 2009. New York: Public Affairs. ISBN 1586487833. 

References

1. ^ Macarthur Fellows 1999
2. ^ UC Berkeley Journalism Faculty Bio
3. ^ "Into the Inferno, with Notebook". "Writer Mark Danner is at his best when the world is at its worst", Harvard magazine, January–February, 2005
4. ^ "The Amazing Human Launching Pads". "Who Runs New York", New York magazine, September 26, 2010
5. ^ "Notable Books of the Year: 1994". "Notable Books of the Year: 1994", New York Times, December 4, 1994
6. ^ "The Great Debate" by Gary Kamiya, salon.com, January 30, 2003
7. ^ "Emanuel Addresses Torture Memos politico.com
8. ^ "www.markdanner.com/teaching"
9. ^ Journalist and Academic Mark Danner to Deliver 2010 Tanner Lectures, with focus on torture
10. ^ American Political Science Association (APSA)

External links

• Official site
• Mark Danner on vimeo
• Mark Danner on youtube
• Mark Danner at GoogleAuthors

Persondata
Name	Danner, Mark
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	November 10, 1958
Place of birth	Utica, New York, USA
Date of death
Place of death