NEW YORK -- Susan Sontag died the same week as a tsunami in south Asia killed over a hundred thousand people. There's no logical connection between these two events. Even though Sontag titled one of her books Regarding the Pain of Others, nothing of substance is to be learned by their juxtaposition except to remark that, when free association counts as intellectual work, as it did in Sontag's world, intimations of significance can always be found. After Sontag published as essay last year in the New York Times about the Abu Ghraib scandal in which she compared prisoner abuse by...