(Fwd) FYI: Tourists and Torturers (Luc Sante, in the NY Times)

[Ivo Skoric]

this is true of any war anywhere - serbs, bosnians, croats, and 
albanians did the same to each other in the balkans - and there are 
trophy pictures on all sides. the less blody sexual humiliation 
employed by the US here is more rare, because it implies LIMITS - and 
therefore it is inconsistent with rogue acts of individual soldiers: 
such acts would not stop at just controlled abuse - controlled abuse 
means following orders, which I am convinced will, ultimately, bring 
Bush administration down.
ivo


------- Forwarded message follows -------
May 11, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Tourists and Torturers
By LUC SANTE

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."



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