This is a perceptive analysis of the photos from Abu Ghraib. The title, by the way, does not seem to fit the article.
Tourists and Torturers
By LUC SANTE / Published: May 11, 2004
So now we think we know who took some of the photographs at Abu Ghraib.
The works attributed to Specialist Jeremy Sivits are fated to remain among
the
indelible
images of our time. They will have changed the course of history; just how
much we do not yet know. It is arguable that without them, news of what happened
within
the walls of that prison would never have emerged from the fog of classified
internal memos. We owe their circulation and perhaps their existence to the
popular technology of our day, to digital cameras and JPEG files and e-mail.
Photographs
can now be disseminated as quickly and widely as rumors. It's possible that
even if Specialist Joseph M. Darby hadn't gone to his superiors in January
and "60
Minutes II" hadn't broken the story last month, some of those pictures
would sooner or later have found their way onto the Web and so into the public
record.
Leaving aside the question of how anyone could have perpetrated the
horrors depicted in those pictures, you can't help but wonder why American
soldiers
would incriminate
themselves by posing next to their handiwork. Americans don't seem to have
a long tradition of that sort of thing. I can't offhand recall having seen
comparable
images from any recent wars, although before the digital era amateur photographs
were harder to spread. There have been many atrocity photographs over the
years, of course — the worst I've ever seen were taken in Algeria in
1961, and once when I was a child another kid found and showed off his father's
cache
of pictures from the Pacific Theater in World War II, which shook me so badly
that
I can't remember with any certainty what they depicted. I'm pretty sure,
though, that they did not show anyone grinning and making self-congratulatory
gestures.
The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American soldiers included
in them look exactly as if they were standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot
marlin. That incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the pictures.
The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England
flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that
for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I registered what I was seeing,
I was reminded of something. There was something familiar about that jaunty
insouciance,
that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then
I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in
photographs of lynchings.
In photographs that were taken and often printed as postcards in the American
heartland in the first four decades of the 20th century, black men are shown
hanging from trees or light fixtures or maybe being burned alive, while below
them white people are laughing and pointing for the benefit of the camera.
There are some pictures of whites being lynched, too, but these tend not to
feature
the holiday crowd. Often the spectators at lynchings of African-Americans are
so effusive in their mugging that they all seem to be vying for credit. Before
seeing such pictures you might expect the faces in them to express some kind
of collective rage; instead the mood is giddy, often verging on hysterical,
with a distinct sexual undercurrent.
Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to
parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because
the thought
of censure probably never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious
collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some people otherwise
known for their
gentleness and sympathy — but isn't the abandonment of such scruples
possible only if the victims are considered less than human? After
all, it is one thing
for a boxer to lift his hands over his head in triumph beside the fallen
body of his rival, quite another to strike a comparable pose next to
the bodies
of strangers you have arranged in quasi-pornographic tableaus. The
Americans in
the photographs are not enacting hatred; hatred can coexist with respect,
however strained. What they display, instead, is contempt: their victims
are merely
objects.
It is conceivable that such events might have occurred in a war in
which the enemy looked like us —certainly, there are Americans
to whom all foreigners are irredeemably Other. Still, it is striking
how, in
wartime, a fundamental
lack of respect for the enemy's body becomes an issue only when the
enemy is perceived as being of another race. You might have heard
about the
strings of human ears collected by some soldiers in Vietnam, or read
the story,
reported
in Life during World War II, about the G.I. who blithely mailed his
girlfriend in Brooklyn a Japanese skull as a Christmas present. And
the concept
of the human
trophy is not restricted to warfare, but permeates the history of
colonialism, from the Congo to Australia, Mexico to India. Treating
those we deem
our equals
as game animals, however, has been out of fashion for quite a few
centuries.
Of course the violence at Abu Ghraib was primarily psychological — hey,
only a few people were killed — and the trophies were pictorial,
like the results of a photo safari. Some commentators have made a
point of noting
this
very relative nonviolence, contrasting it with the lynching of the
four American military contractors in Falluja last month. This line
of argument
is notable
for what it leaves out: there is a difference between the rage of
a people who feel themselves invaded and the contempt of a victorious
nation for
a civilian population whom it has ostensibly liberated.
That prison guards would pose captives — primarily noncombatants, low-level
riffraff — in re-enactments of cable TV smut for the benefit
of their friends back home emerges from the mode of thinking that
has prevented
an accounting of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning of
the war. If
civilian deaths
are not recorded, let alone published, it must be because they
do not matter,
and if they do not matter it must be because the Iraqis are beneath
notice. And
that must mean that anything done to them is permissible, as long
as it does not create publicity that would embarrass the Bush administration.
The possible
consequences of the Abu Ghraib archive are numerous, many of them
horrifying.
Perhaps, though, the digital camera will haunt the future career
of George W. Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of
Richard Nixon.
Luc Sante, who teaches creative writing and the history of photography at Bard College, is the author of "Low Life," "Evidence" and "The Factory of Facts."