Home > What have we done?
The horrific images from Abu Ghraib have come to define
the ill-starred occupation of Iraq, but what do they
really tell us about America? Are they simply the work
of a few rogue soldiers, or the result of the new
foreign and domestic policies of the Bush
administration, which find ready approval in an
increasingly brutalised society?
Susan Sontag on the ugly face of the war on terror
The Guardian
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, Salo (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?