Salon (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/12/beheading_video/index.html) has some interesting speculations about the impact of digital photography on the military’s ability to manage public perceptions of the American occupation of Iraq. Concerned that wartime images undercut public support for the Vietnam War, the military has sought to restrict the production and circulation of images of American war dead and they certainly didn’t want to see images of tortured prisoners getting circulated as porn on the internet. What they never anticipated was that the digital production and distribution of photographs, including those produced by their own people, would make a mockery of such restrictions and reshape how we understood this war.
“I remember during the ’80s Ronald Reagan said that the fax machine would pierce the Iron Curtain,“ says Peter Howe, a photojournalist and the former picture editor of the New York Times Magazine and Life magazine. “What we have today is an extension of that and a proliferation beyond anything we imagined -- now, we are piercing any form of governmental control whatsoever.“
So, we now can see images of flag-draped coffins, sexually humiliated prisoners of war, and beheaded Americans.
The question is why such images are produced to begin with. In the case of the Abu Ghraid photographs, it would seem that this is an example of what has been called the “banality of evil.” The phrase was first applied to the matter of fact way that many Nazis responded to the most horrific aspects of the concentration camps. In recent years, photographs of lynchings of African-Americans have resurfaced and become part of the historical record of the civil rights era. They are now read with shock and horror but the participants recorded them because they were proud of what they were doing. They posed with family, friends, even children in front of the corpses of black men hanging from trees. And they sent them with cheery messages as picture postcards.
Could something like this have happened in Iraq? What we look upon with horror may once have been looked upon with pride. As is so often the case, images circulated on the internet get decontextualized, read according to criteria very different from those intended when they were first produced.
==================
Here is the Salon article cited (accessible with a "free day pass" after viewing an ad)
<quote> "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane -- all of which is true -- that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it and you cannot help but be outraged. " <end quote>
This one was brought to my attention by this article:
Re:Banality of Evil and Digital Photography
« Reply #3 on: 2004-05-14 17:38:02 »
[Lise Carlstrom] Thanks, Rhino; I've reposted these links elsewhere.
[rhinoceros] Heh, it was nice to see that things which got my attention were appreciated by someone else. In common speech, that makes me less weird. In big words, it enhances my sense of coherence.
I don't often get scoops on this site and there is no reason you should trust me, but I have one today. The following events ... light years beyond what you have seen from our troops in Abu Ghraib... are now in the hands of the new Arab-language Television network Al Ahurra. They are videotapes and, in one grisly case, photographs. These are all acts performed by Saddam's soldiers and police in uniform. I am not sure what Al Ahurra will broadcast, but they will be culled from among the following. I am told that when their people saw these tapes, they were unable to watch them. I can understand why. It is hard for me to type them.
First, the photoraphs. They are of actual live castrations of Kurds. Now, the video tapes: Two beheadings, during one of which "Happy Birthday, Saddam" is being sung in Arabic. Fingers being cut off one by one from a hand tied to a board. People being thrown off four-story buildings, one forced to wear a Superman costume. A man scourged ninety-nine times. Three different instances of gas poisonings (probably employing different types), including dead babies.
There may be more. I don't know. I would like to know if any of these torturers is actually in Abu Ghraib right now. Let's hope they were not among those let out. I also would like to know what Senator Kennedy has to say about the moral equivalence of our actions after watching these tapes. And finally, I would like to know why it took so long for these to come out.
I don't often get scoops on this site and there is no reason you should trust me, but I have one today. The following events ... light years beyond what you have seen from our troops in Abu Ghraib... are now in the hands of the new Arab-language Television network Al Ahurra. They are videotapes and, in one grisly case, photographs. These are all acts performed by Saddam's soldiers and police in uniform. I am not sure what Al Ahurra will broadcast, but they will be culled from among the following. I am told that when their people saw these tapes, they were unable to watch them. I can understand why. It is hard for me to type them.
<snip>
[rhinoceros] Joe, I have two objections to this post.
First, this thread has a topic which nobody had any difficulty to follow up to this point. There are other threads here which are more pertinent to a debate on which pictures are the most horrendous. The reason for this remark is that many of us claim the right to hold an occasional meaningful conversation rather that get a point through, the same point over and over in all discussions.
Second, I doubt that this post would have any value in those other threads either. I saw no pictures whatsoever in the link you posted, not to speak of *verified* pictures.
The problem woith American Foreign policies has always been failure to accept other cultures other then their own..
This leads toi failures ovesea's in most things that we do..
We take advantage of other countries and we make profit from it - BUT, it certainly never stabalizes any country or improves it.. In fact.. many of times it goes from one ruthless leader to another with the support of the United States..
A little off the subject but a memory non-the-less.... Certainly something to think about when reallly looking at the policies and directions the U.S. takes..
I can't help but look at guatemala in 1954 and the frist ever CIA intervention to overthrow a government that was supported by the United States.
The reason at the time - Was this government was bad..
bad - has several meanings - in this case it was because it did not support United State companies within their country anymore - Such as DOLE FOODS...
Yes - we overturned a government because of Dole Foods...
Troy Prouty Former board member international relations of u.s. policies and co-founder of indy media.org
>From: "Blunderov" <squooker@mweb.co.za> >Reply-To: virus@lucifer.com >To: <virus@lucifer.com> >Subject: RE: virus: Re:Banality of Evil and Digital Photography >Date: Sat, 15 May 2004 09:28:56 +0200 > >Joe Dees >Sent: 15 May 2004 01:25 AM ><snip> >I also would like to know what Senator Kennedy has to say about the moral >equivalence of our actions after watching these tapes. And finally, I would >like to know why it took so long for these to come out. ></snip> > >[Blunderov]The other day on TV I saw a distressed American wailing 'why >should we be held to different standards than they are?' > >But this is precisely the point of the war, or at least so Bush would have >us believe, - to bring different, better standards to the benighted Iraqis. > >The Geneva Convention doesn't, AFAIK, make any provisions for 'moral >equivalence'. > >Best Regards > > > > >--- >To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to ><http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
RE: virus: Re:Banality of Evil and Digital Photography
« Reply #8 on: 2004-05-15 12:54:10 »
--- Blunderov <squooker@mweb.co.za> wrote: > [Blunderov]The other day on TV I saw a distressed > American wailing 'why > should we be held to different standards than they > are?' > > But this is precisely the point of the war, or at > least so Bush would have > us believe, - to bring different, better standards > to the benighted Iraqis. > > The Geneva Convention doesn't, AFAIK, make any > provisions for 'moral > equivalence'.
Below are some good posts on why we should be appalled if America abuses people, even if other countries do worse.
Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
Re: virus: Re:Banality of Evil and Digital Photography
« Reply #9 on: 2004-05-15 16:39:35 »
Rhino, never doubt your appreciation around this special place.
Your ARE appreciated.
Walter
rhinoceros wrote:
> [Lise Carlstrom] > Thanks, Rhino; I've reposted these links elsewhere. > > [rhinoceros] > Heh, it was nice to see that things which got my attention were appreciated by someone else. In common speech, that makes me less weird. In big words, it enhances my sense of coherence. > > ---- > This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2004 board on Church of Virus BBS. > <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=61;action=display;threadid=30300> > --- > To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
--
Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
"Pursue the small utopias... nature, music, friendship, love" --Kupferberg--
[Blunderov] Thanks - nice links. I keep having to remind people, and myself, that there are very many sane, thoughtful Americans and not all of them buy Bush the Lesser's act. More than 50% of them I'm hoping. Best Regards
It's a tough call whether Abu Musab al-Zarqawi”the Jordanian "militant" who is reportedly responsible for the videotaped butchery of Nicholas Berg”is more stupid than he is brutal, or whether he is a bigger monster than he is a fool. Zarqawi's own nauseating videotape makes the case for his indescribable brutality. The argument that he is Islamism's biggest lunatic yet”no small claim”is similarly straightforward: He has inaugurated an otherwise inconceivable display of comparative atrocity that could deliver his enemy from its own demoralization.
After all, Americans have been sufficiently shamed, dishonored, and demoralized by the repulsive images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that even many prominent war supporters have been reconsidering the effort. Dispirited analysts at the conservative National Review Online have been looking for an exit from the occupation; blogger Andrew Sullivan has asked himself if, knowing in advance how the occupation would proceed, he would have supported the war to begin with. New York Times columnist David Brooks has concluded that the United States misconceived the effect of its own power, and has pronounced the occupation an intellectual failure, even if it ultimately succeeds in establishing a liberal Iraq.
What does Zarqawi do? In "retaliation" for the Abu Ghraib imagery, he stages a singularly nauseating "execution" of a private American citizen who has been wandering around Iraq. The probable effect is to offer many Americans an exit from their own moral horror.
Mind you, Zarqawi's ghouls in this video don't merely "behead" Berg, as most accounts indicate. "Beheading" suggests a quick severing and a quick death. What Zarqawi and his friends do is butcher Berg”there's no other word for it. They don't use a sword or an axe; they use a knife. You can hear Nicholas Berg screaming as Zarqawi's gang hacks at his neck and then pulls at his head until it comes off his body. They then hold his bleeding head in front of the camera. The tape is appalling not only for its utter bloodthirstiness, but also for the total absence of simple human empathy. Elemental empathy”for example, an unwillingness to rip a victim's head from his body”is a primary measure of civilization. (The shame Americans felt at the Abu Ghraib images is, after all, rooted in such empathy.) Even in the dehumanizing context of warfare, which strains the empathy of all its participants, this is savagery.
But if this is a moment of comparative atrocity, the issue becomes whether the Zarqawi horror is capable of having any effect on the Abu Ghraib images. The probable answer is that while the murder tape obviously doesn't make pictures of prisoner abuse any less disgusting or shameful, it does offer many of those who feel disgust and shame a different context in which to perceive those images.
The Abu Ghraib pictures reveal American soldiers humiliating their prisoners in a sadistic manner (in some images, the Americans are actually smirking). It's a painful sight because it is cruel on its own terms (we don't even know if the terrorized individual prisoners are actually guilty of anything), and because we regard such sadism as unworthy of our image of ourselves. Indeed, the pictures are sufficiently difficult that American newspaper editors are increasingly unsure how to play the images that continue to appear. Perhaps sensing a rise of "shame fatigue," some editors have been moving newer images to inside pages. As Washington Post editor Leonard Downie, Jr. put it, "[W]e decided we had published so many shocking photos that it was fine to publish inside rather than on the front page."
By contrast, Zarqawi intentionally tapes and distributes his bloody atrocity; the literal slaughter of an innocent is offered as an example of his righteousness. "Unworthiness" simply never enters the calculation; that it is inhuman is its point. Shameless brutality of this degree has the power to transform the shame of Zarqawi's enemies (those who seek such transformation). Zarqawi has reminded his enemies that, unlike him, they are capable of shame.
One rarely encounters an enemy willing to dehumanize himself this way. It's not unknown: Genghis Khan, sweeping out of Mongolia in the 13th century, sent out an advance phalanx of rumormongers to spread tales of massacre and cruelty, in order to encourage the cities in his path to surrender the more quickly. But that strategy was based on the Mongols' strength, and the relative weakness of the cities that various waves of Mongol armies were intent on sacking, (Baghdad was ultimately among them).
That's hardly the situation in which Zarqawi and his allies find themselves. If the U.S. has a military weakness, it's the one that Vietnam's Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap identified: Wars can be won on the American home front. But you try to win such a war by demoralizing the populace, not by demonstrating your own butchery. Revealing yourself as a butcher only encourages your enemies to find you and kill you.
That's the whole point of atrocity images and stories, both true and false, from Trajan's Column in Rome to the notorious false stories spread during World War I to the phony anti-Iraq baby-incubator testimony of the first Gulf War: to dehumanize the foe. That's the business of the Pan-Arab press: delegitimizing the American effort in Iraq by portraying it in terms of atrocity. In the case of an Al Jazeera, it has been to display civilian corpses; in the case of some Pan-Arab newspapers, it has been to augment genuine pictures of prisoner abuse with stills from pornographic films, and to claim that such stills are also from Abu Ghraib.
That sort of thing is recognizable propaganda in a classic mode. Zarqawi's righteous snuff movie is something different: an act of lunacy, a gift to his enemies, and, one hopes, an unwitting suicide note.
Charles Paul Freund is a Reason senior editor. A version of this article appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Watching Bush give the thumbs up in the face of so much economic misery put me in mind of a certain widely circulated photograph taken in Iraq. There are Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lynndie England, the happy couple, standing above a pile of tortured Iraqi inmates, grinning and giving the double thumbs up. Everything is fine, their eyes seem to be saying, just don’t look down.
There’s something else connecting the sorry state of the U.S. job market and the images coming out of Abu Ghraib. The young soldiers taking the fall for the prison abuse scandal are the McWorkers, prison guards and laid off factory workers of Bush’s so-called economic recovery. The resumes of the soldiers facing abuse charges come straight out of the April U.S. Labor Department Report.
There’s Spc. Sabrina Harman, of Lorton, Va., assistant manager of her local Papa John’s Pizza. There’s Spc. Graner, a prison guard back home in Pennsylvania. There’s Sergeant Ivan Frederick, another prison guard, this time from the Buckingham Correctional Center in rural Virginia.
Before he joined what prisoner rights advocate Van Jones calls “America’s gulag economy,” Frederick had a decent job at the Bausch & Lomb factory in Mountain Lake, Md. But according to the New York Times, that factory shut down and moved to Mexico one of the nearly 900,000 jobs that the Economic Policy Institute estimates have been lost since NAFTA, the vast majority in manufacturing.
Free trade has turned the U.S. labour market into an hourglass: plenty of jobs at the bottom, a fair bit at the top, but very little in the middle. At the same time, getting from the bottom to the top has become increasingly difficult, with tuition at state colleges up by more than 50 per cent since 1990.
And that’s where the U.S. military comes in: the army has positioned itself as the bridge across America’s growing class chasm: money for tuition in exchange for military service. Call it the NAFTA draft.
It worked for Lynndie England, the most infamous of the Abu Ghraib accused. She joined the 372 Military Police Company to pay for college, hoping to replace her job at the chicken processing plant with a career in meteorology. Her colleague Sabrina Harman told the Washington Post, “I knew nothing at all about the military except that they would pay for college. So I signed up.”
The poverty of the soldiers at the center of the prison scandal has been used both as evidence of their innocence, and to compound their guilt. On the one hand, Sgt. First Class Paul Shaffer explains that at Abu Ghraib, “you’re a person who works at McDonald’s one day; the next day you’re standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they’re sick and half are saying they’re hungry.” And Gary Myers, the lawyer defending several of the soldiers, asked The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?”
On the other side, the British Sun tabloid has dubbed Lynndie England the “Trailer trash torturer,” while Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph that Americans were being shamed by “smirking jezebels from the Appalachians.”
The truth is that the poverty of the soldiers involved in prison torture makes them neither more guilty, nor less. But the more we learn about them, the clearer it becomes that the lack of good jobs and social equality in the U.S. is precisely what brought them to Iraq in the first place. Despite his attempts to use the economy to distract attention from Iraq, and his efforts to isolate the soldiers as un-American deviants, these are the children George Bush left behind, fleeing dead-end McJobs, abusive prisons, unaffordable education, and closed factories.
And they are his children in another way too: it’s in the ubiquitous thumbs-up sign that they flash, seemingly oblivious to the disaster at their feet. This is the quintessential George Bush pose. Convinced that U.S. voters want a positive president, the Bush team has learned to use optimism as an offensive weapon: no matter how devastating the crisis, no matter how many lives have been destroyed, they have insistently given the world the thumbs up.
Donald Rumsfeld? “Doing a superb job,” according to the optimist-in-chief. The mission in Iraq? “We're making progress, you bet,” Bush told reporters one year after his disastrous “Mission Accomplished” speech. And the U.S. job market, which has driven so many into poverty? “Yes, America Can!”
We don’t yet know who taught these young soldiers how to effectively torture their prisoners. But we do know who taught them how to stay happy go lucky in the face of tremendous suffering that lesson came straight from the top.
RE: virus: Re:Banality of Evil and Digital Photography
« Reply #14 on: 2004-05-17 05:39:17 »
The US does not have that much economic misery. The US economy was primarily shaped by the Clinton years. It is not Bush who talks about the US economic recovery (from the slight recession that started in the last years of the Clinton Administration) but the press. Here is a typical report from a South African publication - http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2076154&fSectionId=631&fSetId=3 04 . Yes the Abu Ghraib abusers came from poor backgrounds, but then again virtually all non-ranking soldiers are drawn from the domestic poor. This is why blacks and Hispanics are so over-represented in those ranks.
The contempt shown world wide for these wrongdoers was coloured by a familiar bigotry. Not only did these people commit these wrongs but worse, they "hillbillies", "backwoodsmen" or "trailer trash". America's white rural poor are the only group one can attack with impunity and let loose the full broadside of bigotry and group hatred. Even the gentlemanly Boris Johnson could not check himself.
Lynndie England is in many ways exemplary. Born to extreme poverty, she worked and planned her way out of poverty. She could have been a perfect American Dream candidate. Need she be imprisoned and heavily punished? I do not think that would be just. Catch the people who might have murdered prisoners. Catch the people who might have tortured them.
But the people who frightened and humiliated them - people like Lynndie England - their wrongs in my mind and not even crimes. This is the reality of war and interrogation. I suspect that England and company were directed by Military Intelligence and that these interrogation methods were successful.
If it were discovered that these interrogations saved US lives, would that make a difference? Given a choice would you accept this: One of your soldiers lives saved for 10 of the enemy humiliated?
I think we ought to stop the hypocritical finger pointing at these miscreants and face up the messy task of fighting enemies that not only do not share our values or restraint but actively use them against us.
It is time to adapt and that adaptation might mean that the gentlemanly rules of engagement and prisoner care developed by and for civilised people be not apply when facing enemies that scorn those rules.
An enemy whose Commander in Chief personally apologises for the wrongdoings of a tiny number of renegade soldiers sets the upper standard. An enemy that beheads captives, ransoms body parts or flies whole plane loads of its prisoners into buildings, sets the opposite, lowest standard.
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