Author and social critic Susan Sontag, one of the most powerful thinkers of her generation and a leading voice of intellectual opposition to American policy after the Sept. 11 attacks, died on Tuesday at a New York cancer hospital. She was 71.
She ignited a firestorm of criticism when she declared that the Sept. 11 attacks were not a «cowardly attack» on civilization but «an act undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.»
With much of America still too shocked to consider such views, she was vilified in some quarters. An op-ed piece in the Boston Globe contended the comments confirmed what many already thought about her: «high IQ, but a few quarts low on compassion and common sense.»
Sontag has since been an outspoken critic of U.S. President George W. Bush over his response to the Sept. 11 attacks and particularly the U.S. war in Iraq.
In May this year she wrote an essay in the New York Times about the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad, arguing that the shocking photographs of the abuse would likely becoming the defining images of the war.

(reuters)