The Ugly Face Of The
War On Terror
By Susan Sontag
The Guardian - UK
5-24-4

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, SalÛ (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?

© Susan Sontag 2004 Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://WWW.GUARDIAN.CO.UK/usa/story/0,12271,1223344,00.html