The missing 997 words

The power of a picture to evoke a feeling and convey a meaning more elegantly and more efficiently than mere words is, especially in these times, awe inspiring. One of the reasons I enjoy illustrating many of my entries with photos is due to their ability to describe my subject far more completely and without bias than I can. In the wake of the Iraqi prison torture photos I have been waiting and hoping for an explanation of how people could do this, take photos of it and display them proudly on their PC. Regardless of all the rhetoric about 'this is war' or 'but they attacked first' or 'they beheaded an American', I want to understand how anyone and everyone who knew about it and participated in it could follow their orders so completely that they went an extra mile and posed for pictures in which they exuded a pride one usually only sees in game hunter photos including the dead carcass of the one that didn't get away.

Being an American abroad in a country that is neither NATO or supplying combatant troops to Iraq amplifies my feelings of betrayal by my own country and the scrutiny by the rest of the world who don't wonder at the news since they've known all along that we're just a bunch of thugs who frequently break or refashion the rules of engagement to suit our whims. I haven't been proud to be an American in so many years that it seems pointless to try to count them, but this is a new low. Much of America, in a collective white trash playground yawp, will rebutt the outrage by saying something ignorant like "War is hell" or "We saved them from Saddam" while forgetting that the whole exercise was to liberate Iraq, not take over the country and pick up where Saddam left off at Abu Ghraib. Who knew about this and why did it take so long to hit the press? There are a lot of troops over there and a number who have returned already. Why aren't we asking them to stand up and testify? I know a few people serving in Iraq, one of whom was even an MP in or near Baghdad, and every day I resist the urge to send them an email with one line: Did you know? I suppose I don't because I'm afraid that all of them will say yes and I don't know that I have a response to that which wouldn't sound confrontational and accusatory. Of course they knew.

The most disturbing part of the photos is the gloating and posing by the soldiers, but there was something oddly familiar about them, too, that I just couldn't place. Fortunately, Susan Sontag has reminded me why in What Have We Done?":

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.

I've seen some of those pictures from the age of lynching as a sport and they are every bit as repellent as the ones from Abu Ghraib. It's pretty sad to think that, in spite of exterminating 6 million people during a war, the Nazi's didn't pose with piles of skulls like a game fisherman who just hauled in a great catch, no, they apparently still had some shred of decency left somewhere. They even had fine Leica cameras to document it with, not some crappy, grainy mobile phone camera. I mean, what in the fuck is going on here? Baseball, Apple Pie and Torture: The American Way makes an attempt to put some of the blame where it belongs, on Americans. Why is America behaving like it's the only damn country who ever sustained an attack by terrorists and are lashing out as though rounding up all the people in Iraq and torturing them is going to either stop terrorism or elicit good will from those who aren't planning to bomb the US?

As someone who isn't living in the back patting, thumbs up, alrighty let's kill some terrorists enclave of the continental US, I'll gladly inform those who are that the only thing that is working, is making those of us with US passports feel even more exposed, more ashamed and desperate to not be mistaken as an American. We keep waiting and watching for some sign, some faint hope that the people of America will find someone to rally around and march on Washington and riot in the streets. I suppose we'll be waiting until the Wal-Mart runs out of cheap crap to buy. America is a country of sheep who follow orders, obediently consume and optimistically hope that no matter if they sit on the couch and do nothing that everything will turn out alright. Optimism. Always.

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words and the only words I've been getting from them are "Fuck the World." I want the other 997 words explaining how in the hell it happened, continued to happen, pictures made it onto screensavers and everyone just watched and 'followed orders'. I want to know this as it's the same thing that happened with Hitler's willing executioners. How is it that the US is the arbiter of democracy and truth? I want those 997 words that the pictures were at a loss to explain.