[Wgcp-whc] some of the texts for 10-15
richard.deming at yale.edu
richard.deming at yale.edu
Thu Oct 7 00:33:13 EDT 2004
Dear Friends,
we'll try to circulate the texts by electronic means. The Kent
Johnson poem, (or rather series of prose poems) appears here:
http://www.blazevox.org/kent.htm
The etxt of the two essays (Sontag and Sandweis) appears below. The
Fourcade and Espitalier will appear in one form or another within a few
days via our spiritual leader, Jean-Jacques Poucel.
onward,
R. Deming
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sandweiss
1 of 2 DOCUMENTS
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
April 4, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 4; Column 2; Editorial Desk; Pg. 13
LENGTH: 624 words
HEADLINE: Death on the Front Page
BYLINE: By Martha A. Sandweiss.
Martha A. Sandweiss is a professor of American studies and history
at Amherst
College and the author of ''Print the Legend: Photography and the
American West.
''
DATELINE: AMHERST, Mass.
BODY:
The public outcry after many newspapers printed grisly images of the
charred
bodies of American civilians in Falluja, Iraq, should have come as no
surprise.
Photographs are powerful, and Americans have long found it difficult to
face
those that capture the horror of war.
The Mexican War, from 1846 to 1848, was the first American war to
be
photographed. Working with the awkward daguerreotype process,
photographers
could not create pictures of the battlefield dead or wounded. The
closest any
came were photographs of a slain soldier's grave. But the public
preferred
patriotic prints and lithographs that inscribed American deaths with a
narrative
of heroism. An imagined picture of a noble death held more appeal than
a picture
of a windswept grave site.
Not until the Civil War did Americans see photographs of actual
battlefield
dead. By today's standards, these pictures were tame. The laborious wet-
plate
negative process made it impossible to take pictures of battlefield
action, so
the photographers captured the casualties of war during the brief
window between
the end of a battle and the burial of the bodies.
Even such opportunities were limited. Alexander Gardner, in his
celebrated '
'Photographic Sketchbook of the War'' of 1866, employed clever camera
angles and
deceptive captions so that he could use the same corpses to represent
both Union
and Confederate casualties. Dead soldiers who conveyed a tale of
Confederate
desolation in one picture were made to serve a narrative of Union
heroism in the
next.
Still, these photographs of battlefield carnage stunned Americans,
even
those who had much greater familiarity with the Civil War than most
Americans
now have with Iraq. In the fall of 1862 The New York Times reviewed the
display
of Antietam dead in Mathew Brady's New York gallery, noting: ''Mr.
Brady has
done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness
of war.
If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryard and along
the
streets, he has done something very like it.''
For the writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had rushed to Antietam to
look for
his wounded son, the future jurist, seeing Brady's photographs stirred
painful
memories. ''It is so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over
these
views that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained
and
sordid scene, stewed with rags and wrecks, come back to us,'' he
wrote. ''We
buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the
mutilated
remains of the dead they too vividly represented.'' Nonetheless, the
pictures
were as alluring as they were repellent. Crowds pressed up against the
windows
of Brady's gallery to stare.
The story of war photography since the Civil War is one of
technological
change -- the emergence of half-tone reproduction technologies that
allowed
photographs to appear in newspapers and magazines, the development of
cheaper
color printing technologies, the rise of film and television, the
spread of
digital cameras and the Internet.
So it is a bit of a paradox that while photographers can now
finally capture
the fury and pace of warfare, few are getting the chance to do so. The
news
media have been reluctant to publish images of death in Iraq, and the
Bush
administration has done its best to hamper photographers, even banning
photographs of body bags and coffins. Perhaps this absence of other
sorts of
photographic images from Iraq made the horrific images from Falluja
seem even
more disturbing.
Those incensed by the pictures should ask themselves what is most
troubling,
the fact that the violence happened or that we have photographs of it?
No image
of war is ever as brutal as war itself.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
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Sontag
1 of 1 DOCUMENT
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
May 23, 2004 Sunday
Correction Appended
Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 6; Column 1; Magazine Desk; Pg. 25
LENGTH: 4250 words
HEADLINE: Regarding The Torture Of Others
BYLINE: By Susan Sontag.
Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding the Pain
of Others.
''
BODY:
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.
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
CORRECTION-DATE: May 23, 2004
CORRECTION:
Because of an editing error, an article on Page 24 of The Times
Magazine
today about the photographs of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib renders a
word
incorrectly in a sentence about sexual images. The sentence should
read, ''An
erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in
digital
photographs and on video'' -- not ''that whither.''
GRAPHIC: Photos: An Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib: The horror of what is
shown in
the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the
photographs were
taken. (Photograph from Polaris)
Far left, most of the pictures, like this one of simulated sex, seem
part of a
larger confluence of torture and pornography. Left, showing the
pictures
uncropped gives a different and in some instances more appalling view.
What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme
sadomasochistic longings, is being normalized, by some, as high-
spirited play or
venting. (Photograph, left, courtesy of the Washington Post)
On this photograph, Specialist Charles Graner (shown bottom left)
indicated by
a number key who was with him at Abu Ghraib. (Photograph from Guy L.
Womack)
LOAD-DATE: May 23, 2004
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