For those of you with an interest in oral presentations in addition to written, I will be at the Albany Public Library at noon today to discuss the book “Standard Operating Procedure,” which chronicles the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison in Iraq.

It’s an intriguing question: How did fresh-faced American soldiers so easily become torturers?

The book is based on interviews with many of the participants and on transcripts of interviews conducted by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. I can’t say it answers the fundamental question, but it lays out enough facts and gives the torturers themselves enough leeway to muse and explain that the reader can devise his own theories.

The reader of this blog, meanwhile, may have noticed that I have become somewhat lax in adding to it. It’s true. The thing was a like a hungry animal that needed constantly to be fed, and I got tired of it. I said, let it starve. I’ve got that other animal to feed, my regular column in the print edition of the Daily Gazette that I care about much more and where I direct my best energies.