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[Louise Desrenards]

http://donswaim.com/nytimes.sontag.html

 The New York Times
May 23, 2004
Regarding the Torture of Others
By SUSAN SONTAG

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 which 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.

Susan Sontag is the author, most recently, of ''Regarding the Pain of
Others.''


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company