May 23, 2004
By SUSAN SONTAG
I. For a long time -- at least six decades -- photographs have laid down the
tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered. The Western memory
museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable power to
determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining
association of people everywhere with the war that the United States launched
pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of the torture of Iraqi
prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu
Ghraib.
The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a
public-relations disaster -- the dissemination of the photographs -- rather than
deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the
pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the
photographs themselves. The administration's initial response was to say that
the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs -- as if the fault or
horror lay in the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance
of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possibly been the objects of ''abuse,''
eventually of ''humiliation'' -- that was the most to be admitted. ''My
impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe
technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture'
word.''
Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the
word ''genocide'' while some 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered,
over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago that indicated the
American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what
took place in Abu Ghraib -- and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in
Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay -- by its true name, torture, is as outrageous
as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the
definitions of torture contained in a convention to which the United States is a
signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or
mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining
from him or a third person information or a confession.'' (The definition comes
from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading
Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in
customary law and in treaties, starting with Article 3 -- common to the four
Geneva conventions of 1949 -- and many recent human rights conventions.) The
1984 convention declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a
state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other
public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'' And all
covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate
the victim, like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.
Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the
widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere --
trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior military
figures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to
the victims -- it is probable that the ''torture'' word will continue to be
banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradict
everything this administration has invited the public to believe about the
virtue of American intentions and America's right, flowing from that virtue, to
undertake unilateral action on the world stage.
Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's
reputation everywhere in the world widened and deepened, to use the ''sorry''
word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim to moral
superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside
King Abdullah II of Jordan, he was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the
Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, he went
on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand
the true nature and heart of America.''
To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to
those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster
tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge
tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The
issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e., ''not by
everybody'') -- but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts
are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of
Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted
by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such
acts likely.
II.
Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are
representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together
with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo,
the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised
recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption the mystifying, near-total
unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities
of the country after its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching,
distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States
has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the
president so decides, ''unlawful combatants'' -- a policy enunciated by Donald
Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early as January 2002 -- and thus,
as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the Geneva
Convention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes
committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges or access to
lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001.
So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the
photographs reveal to have happened to ''suspects'' in American custody? No: the
horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror
that the photographs were taken -- with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over
their helpless captives. German soldiers in the Second World War took
photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but
snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are
exceedingly rare, as may be seen in a book just published, ''Photographing the
Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to what these
pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching
taken between the 1880's and 1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the
naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree.
The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose
participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures
from Abu Ghraib.
The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies -- taken
by a photographer in order to be collected, stored in albums, displayed. The
pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shift in
the use made of pictures -- less objects to be saved than messages to be
disseminated, circulated. A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers.
Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the
soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun,
their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and
swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least
or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real
time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm
for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own
reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth,
making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of
their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life
goes with the recording of family life -- even when, or especially when, the
family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant
home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was
the most astonishing material in ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent
documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia
charges.
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be captured in
digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as
something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as
more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are
interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one
another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in
those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts
among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man
made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires, reportedly told he would be
electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful
positions, or made to stand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they
count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look at the terror on the
victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the
acceptable. But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture
and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic
dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on
the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic
imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out
Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.
III.
To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore
to go on with one's life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera's
nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the
community of actions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the
acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part
of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one
is now more inclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former
times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to be photographed. The
grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after
stacking the naked men, you couldn't take a picture of them.
Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the
sufferings and humiliation of another human being? Set guard dogs at the
genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hooded prisoners
to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naive for
asking, since the answer is, self-evidently, People do these things to other
people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the most common forms
of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was
run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told,
or made to feel, that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be
humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people
they are torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of
these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their
perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the
pictures show.
Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen
by many people: it was all fun. And this idea of fun is, alas, more and more --
contrary to what President Bush is telling the world -- part of ''the true
nature and heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance
of brutality in American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the
video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys -- can the
video game ''Interrogating the Terrorists'' really be far behind? -- and on to
the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant
kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to
have grown. From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many
American suburban high schools -- depicted in Richard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed
and Confused'' -- to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual
humiliation in college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a
country in which the fantasies and the practice of violence are seen as good
entertainment, fun.
What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme
sadomasochistic longings -- as in Pier Paolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable
film, ''Salo'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt in
northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era -- is now being normalized, by
some, as high-spirited play or venting. To ''stack naked men'' is like a college
fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions of
Americans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the
photographs? No matter. The observation -- or is it the fantasy? -- was on the
mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was Limbaugh's
response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different
than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin
people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then
we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are
the American soldiers, the torturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these
people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good
time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''
Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis.
And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that
the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of
international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the
atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of
private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal,
you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated
by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning
admiration for unapologetic brutality.
IV.
The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the president and
the secretary of defense are a sufficient response is an insult to one's
historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is
a direct consequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle
with which the Bush administration has sought to change, change radically, the
international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic
institutions and prerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country
to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war -- for ''the war on terror''
is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless
incarcerations. Those held in the extralegal American penal empire are ''detainees'';
''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete word, might suggest that they have the rights
accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This
endless ''global war on terrorism'' -- into which both the quite justified
invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have been folded by
Pentagon decree -- inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone
declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition
that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.
The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and
Afghanistan being nonexistent -- the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of
those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the
wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of ''suspects'' -- the
principal justification for holding them is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation
about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation
is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion,
humiliation and torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the ''ticking time
bomb'' situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies
torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general
or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and
civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about
whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are
singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An
interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist
of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners
to talk. Softening them up, stressing them out -- these are the euphemisms for
the bestial practices in American prisons where suspected terrorists are being
held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in his diary, a
prisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag
with ice on his chest may well be of the man Frederick was describing.
The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in
which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to
acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions
of reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other
reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the
atrocious punishments inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in
prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq,
have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports
were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or
Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it
became clear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all
this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words,
which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction
and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget.
So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as many Americans are
bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying
they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless
stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or
showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, like that of
a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some instances more appalling
view), would be in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,''
read: critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For there can be
no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of
the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and
responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across the globe.'' This
damage -- to our reputation, our image, our success as the lone superpower -- is
what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of ''our
freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having
American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected
officials.
Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging
in an orgy of self-condemnation. The continuing publication of the pictures is
being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right to
defend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists) started it. They -- Osama bin
Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's the difference? -- attacked us first. Senator
James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he
was not the only member of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage'' over
the photographs than by what the photographs show. ''These prisoners,'' Senator
Inhofe explained, ''you know they're not there for traffic violations. If
they're in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're
terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on
their hands, and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those
individuals.'' It's the fault of ''the media'' which are provoking, and will
continue to provoke, further violence against Americans around the world. More
Americans will die. Because of these photos.
There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not because
of the photographs but because of what the photographs reveal to be happening,
happening with the complicity of a chain of command -- so Maj. Gen. Antonio
Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among others) Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, suggested, after he saw the
Pentagon's full range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has an elaborate nature
to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or not others were directing or
encouraging,'' Senator Graham said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat,
said that viewing an uncropped version of one photo showing a stack of naked men
in a hallway -- a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the
scene, some not even paying attention -- contradicted the Pentagon's assertion
that only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewhere along the line,'' Senator
Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were either told or winked at.'' An
attorney for Specialist Charles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his
client identify the men in the uncropped version; according to The Wall Street
Journal, Graner said that four of the men were military intelligence and one a
civilian contractor working with military intelligence.
V.
But the distinction between photograph and reality -- as between spin and
policy -- can easily evaporate. And that is what the administration wishes to
happen. ''There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeld
acknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to the public, obviously,
it's going to make matters worse.'' Worse for the administration and its
programs, presumably, not for those who are the actual -- and potential? --
victims of torture.
The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to censor
soldiers overseas, who don't write letters home, as in the old days, that can be
opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today's soldiers
instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with
digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them
off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The administration's
effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the
argument is taking a legalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as
evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may be prejudiced if they are
made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
John Warner of Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of
sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqi prisoners, said he felt ''very
strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it
could possibly endanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are
serving and at great risk.''
But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come
from the continuing effort to protect the administration and cover up our
misrule in Iraq -- to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign
to undermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just
as it was regarded by many as an implicit criticism of the war to show on
television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the course
of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought
unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographs and further tarnish the image of
America.
After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of
the people who got us into this rotten war seem to have expected. In our digital
hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that one
picture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at
them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable.
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