- For a long time - at least six decades - photographs
have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judged and remembered.
The memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperable
power to determine what people recall of events, and it now seems likely
that the defining association of people everywhere with the rotten war
that the Americans launched preemptively in Iraq last year will be photographs
of the torture of Iraqi prisoners in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's
prisons, Abu Ghraib.
-
- The slogans and phrases fielded by the Bush administration
and its defenders have been chiefly aimed at limiting a public relations
disaster - the dissemination of the photographs - rather than dealing with
the complex crimes of leadership, policies and authority revealed by the
pictures. There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality on to
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 defence 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 the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda
was being carried out 10 years ago that meant the American government had
no intention of doing anything. To call what took place in Abu Ghraib -
and, almost certainly, in other prisons in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and
in Guantanamo - by its true name, torture, would likely entail a public
investigation, trials, court martials, dishonourable discharges, resignation
of senior military figures and responsible cabinet officials, and substantial
reparations to the victims. Such a response to our misrule in Iraq would
contradict everything this administration has invited the American public
to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America's right
to unilateral action on the world stage in defence of its interests and
its security.
-
- 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, to its hegemonic goal of
bringing "freedom and democracy" to the benighted Middle East.
Yes, Mr 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 "as 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 they
are done by individuals (ie, not by "everybody"). All acts are
done by individuals. The question is not whether the torture was the work
of a few individuals but whether it was systematic. Authorised. Condoned.
Covered up. It was - all of the above. 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.
-
- Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That
is, they are representative of distinctive policies and of the fundamental
corruptions of colonial rule. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in
Algeria, committed identical atrocities and practised torture and sexual
humiliation on despised, recalcitrant natives. Add to this corruption,
the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq
to deal with the complex realities of an Iraq after its "liberation"
- that is, conquest. And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines
of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked
on an endless war (against a protean enemy called "terrorism"),
and that those detained in this war are "unlawful combatants"
- a policy enunciated by Rumsfeld as early as January 2002 - and therefore
"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 and access to lawyers in American-run
prisons that have been set up as part of the response to the attack of
September 11 2001. Endless war produces the option of endless detention,
which is subject to no judicial review.
-
- So, then, the real issue is not the photographs 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. (See 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 - collected in
a book entitled Without Sanctuary - of black victims of lynching taken
between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most
of them church-going, respectable citizens, 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.
-
- If there is a difference, it is a difference created
by the increasing ubiquity of photographic actions. 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 reflect a shift in the use made of pictures
- less objects to be saved than evanescent messages to be disseminated,
circulated. A digital camera is a common possession of most 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 emailing them around the globe.
-
- There is more and more recording of what people do, by
themselves. 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
millions of 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 the
recent documentary about a Long Island family embroiled in paedophilia
charges, Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans [2003].) An erotic life
is, for more and more people, what can be captured on video.
-
- 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 non-stop attentions. But it 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 one is inflicting on
helpless, trussed, naked victims is only part of the story. There is the
primal satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is 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.
-
- You ask yourself how someone can grin at the sufferings
and humiliation of another human being - drag a naked Iraqi man along the
floor with a leash? set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering,
naked prisoners? rape and sodomise prisoners? force shackled hooded prisoners
to masturbate or commit sexual acts with each other? beat prisoners to
death? - and feel naive in asking the questions, since the answer is, self-evidently:
people do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration
camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too,
do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that
those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated,
tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they
are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the
meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but
that their perpetrators 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 Mr 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 games
of killing that are the principal entertainment of young males to the violence
that has become endemic in the group rites of youth on an exuberant kick.
From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American
suburban high schools - depicted in Richard Linklater's film Dazed and
Confused (1993) - to the rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliation
to be found in working-class bar culture, and institutionalised in our
colleges and universities as hazing - America has become a country in which
the fantasies and the practice of violence are, increasingly, seen as good
entertainment, fun.
-
- What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise
of extreme sado-masochistic longings - such as Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable
film, SalÛ (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the fascist redoubt
in northern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era - is now being normalised,
by the apostles of the new, bellicose, imperial America, as high-spirited
prankishness 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!" exclaimed Limbaugh. "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?"
-
- It's likely that quite a large number of Americans would
rather think that it is all right to torture and humiliate other human
beings - who, as our putative or suspected enemies, have forfeited all
their rights - than to acknowledge the folly and ineptitude and fraud of
the American venture in Iraq. As for torture and sexual humiliation as
fun, there seems little to oppose this tendency while America continues
to turn itself into a garrison state, in which patriots are defined as
those with unconditional respect for armed might and for the necessity
of maximal domestic surveillance. Shock and awe was what our military promised
the Iraqis who resisted their American liberators. And shock and the awful
are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have
delivered: a pattern of criminal behaviour in open defiance and contempt
of international humanitarian conventions. But there seems no reversing
for the moment America's commitment to self-justification, and the condoning
of its increasingly out-of-control culture of violence. Soldiers now pose,
thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures
to their buddies and family. What is revealed by these photographs is as
much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic
brutality. Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly,
you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamour to get
on a television show to reveal.
-
- The notion that "apologies" or professions
of "disgust" and "abhorrence" by the president and
the secretary of defence are a sufficient response to the systematic torture
and murder of prisoners revealed at Abu Ghraib 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 doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush
administration has sought to fundamentally change the domestic and foreign
policy of the US. The Bush administration has committed the country to
a new, pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war - for "the war
on terror" is nothing less than that. What has happened in the new,
international carceral empire run by the US military goes beyond even the
notorious procedures enshrined in France's Devil's Island and Soviet Russia's
Gulag system, which in the case of the French penal island had, first,
both trials and sentences, and in the case of the Russian prison empire
a charge of some kind and a sentence for a specific number of years. Endless
war permits the option of endless incarceration - without charges, without
the release of prisoners' names or any access to family members and lawyers,
without trials, without sentences. Those held in the extra-legal 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 civilised countries. This endless "war on
terror" inevitably leads to the demonising and dehumanising of anyone
declared by the Bush administration to be a possible terrorist: a definition
that is not up for debate. An interminable war inevitably suggests the
appropriateness of interminable detention.
-
- The charges against most of the people detained in the
prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being non-existent - the Red Cross estimates
that 70% to 90% of those being held have apparently 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 situations,
the "ticking bomb" scenario, which is sometimes used as a limiting
case that justifies torture of prisoners. This is information-gathering
authorised by American military and civilian administrators to learn more
of a shadowy empire of evildoers about which Americans know virtually nothing,
in countries about which they are singularly ignorant - so that any "information"
might be useful. An interrogation which produced no information (whatever
the 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 were the usual euphemisms for the bestial practices that
have become rampant in American prisons where "suspected terrorists"
are being held. Unfortunately, it seems, more than a few got "too
stressed out" and died.
-
- 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 report submitted by the International Committee of the Red
Cross, and other, sketchier reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian
organisations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on "detainees"
and "suspected terrorists" in prisons run by the American military,
have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that any
of these reports were read by Mr Bush or Mr Cheney or Ms Rice or Mr 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 Mr Bush and his associates. Up to then, there
had been only words, which are a lot easier to cover up in our age of infinite
digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination.
-
- 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 that they have seen "enough".
Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs.
Will American newspaper, magazine and television editors now debate whether
showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which, with some of the
best-known images, gives a different and in some instances more appalling
view of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib), would be in "bad
taste" or too implicitly political? By "political", read:
critical of the Bush administration. For there can be no doubt that the
photographs damage, as Mr Rumsfeld testified, the reputation of "the
honourable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsibly
and professionally protecting our freedoms across the globe". This
damage - to our reputation, our image, our success as an imperial power
- is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection
of "our freedoms" - and he is talking here about the freedom
of Americans only, 6% of the population of the planet - came to require
having American soldiers in any country where it chooses to be ("across
the globe") is not up for debate either. America is under attack.
America sees itself as the victim of potential or future terror. America
is only defending itself, against implacable, furtive enemies.
-
-
- 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,
the fanatics) started it. They - Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's
the difference? - attacked us first. James Inhofe, a Republican member,
from Oklahoma, 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 what the
photographs show. "These prisoners," Sen 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" - usually called "the liberal
media" - which is 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. It is not
because of the photographs but of what the photographs reveal to be happening,
happening at the behest of and with the complicity of a chain of command
that reaches up to the highest level of the Bush administration. But the
distinction - between photograph and reality, between policy and spin -
easily evaporates in most people's minds. And that is what the administration
wishes to happen.
-
- "There are a lot more photographs and videos that
exist," Mr Rumsfeld acknowledged in his testimony. "If these
are released to the public, obviously, it is going to make matters worse."
Worse for the US and its programmes, presumably. Not for those who are
the actual victims of torture. The media may self-censor, as is its wont.
But, as Mr 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, but, instead, function
like tourists, "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 will continue, however - the argument is taking a more legalistic
turn: now the photographs are "evidence" in future criminal cases,
whose outcome may be prejudiced if the photographs are made public. But
the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from
the ongoing effort to protect the Bush administration and its policies
- to identify "outrage" over the photographs with a campaign
to undermine the 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 were killed
in the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly
be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the aberrant photographs and tarnish
and besmirch the reputation - that is, the image - of America.
-
- After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell.
The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Hey, we were only having fun. 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 there will be
thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable. Can the video game, "Hazing
at Abu Ghraib" or "Interrogating the Terrorists", be far
behind?
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- © Susan Sontag 2004 Guardian Unlimited © Guardian
Newspapers Limited 2004 http://WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/usa/story/0,12271,1223344,00.html
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