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Today's
Stories
May
17, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Rumsfeld's Sovereignty Shell Game
May
15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
Douglas
Valentine
ABCs of American Interrogation: Phoenix Program, Revisited
John
Stanton
Kings of Pain: UK, US and Israel
Ben
Tripp
Torture: a Fond Reminiscence
Brian
Cloughley
Where are You Heading, America? Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot
Act
Justin
E. H. Smith
Islam and Democracy: the Lesson from Turkey
Brandy
Baker
Equal Opportunity Torture: Lynddie England, the Right and Feminism
John
Chuckman
Peep Show on Capitol Hill: Sex, Lies and Videotape
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Goon Squad
John
Holt
Fencing the Sky
Ron
Jacobs
The Power of Patti Smith
Brian
J. Foley
Why the Outrage Over Abu Ghraib?
Robin
Philpot
Re-writing the History of the Rwandan Genocide
Eric
Leser
The Carlyle Empire
Ray
Hanania
From Abu Ghraib to Nick Berg: There's No Such Thing as a Good
War Crime
Jeff
Halper
Dozers of Mass Destruction
Joe
Surkiewicz
Inside the Baltimore Detention Center
John
Whitlow
Iraq Goddamn
Michael
Leon
Invitation to a Beheading: Why Bush Should Watch the Berg Video
Poets'
Basement
Krieger, Ford, LaMorticella, Smith and Albert
May
14, 2004
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's POW Porn
Ron
Jacobs
Secret History of the War on Drugs
William
Blum
God, Country and Torture
Michael
Donnelly
The People v. Corporate Greed: A Victory on the North Coast
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India Shines
Stephen
Gowans
Building Democracy in Iraq and Other
Absurdities
May
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Where is Kerry?
Colm
O'Laithian
Torture and Degradation: Revenge American Style?
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassan
Wal-Mart: Scrooge with Hi-Tech Accounting
Practices
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush on the Inhumane Treatment of Iraqi Prisoners
Willliam
James Martin
Deir Yassin Massacre Recalled
Marc
Salomon
Reality TV Bites
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
May 11, 2004
Mark
Engler
On the "Necessity" of Torture
Ray
McGovern
More Troops? A March of Folly
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
Mickey
Z.
Less Than Hero
Christopher
Reed
Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse
Dennis
Hans
When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar
Bruce
Jackson
Pete Seeger at 85
Mike
Whitney
Killing al Sadr
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Shrinking the Guatemalan Military
William
A. Cook
The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation,
Nakedly Displayed
May
10, 2004
Robert
Fisk
From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism
and Torture as Entertainment
Wayne
Madsen
The Israeli Torture Template: Rape,
Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks
Col.
Dan Smith
The Shame of Abu Ghraib
Joe
Bageant
John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!
Ron
Jacobs
Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave
Ben
Tripp
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage
Ray
Hanania
Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse
Reza
Fiyouzat
"Mishandled" Invasions
Diane
Christian
Images & Abstractions &
Genitals
Website
of the Day
Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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May
17, 2004
Inside Abu Ghraib
The Violence
of the Camera
By SHAKIRAH ESMAIL-HUDANI
The pictures say it all--or do they?
Sordid echoes of the past. Now, ironically transposed: American
captors, Iraqi prisoners. A testimony to the reversibility of
the pontifical discourse that underlay the invasion. Even, finally,
the admitted risk of some equivalence of measure. Yet equivalence
can be destabilizing when your project is justified within a
moralizing frame, when 'our freedom' and your lack of it is used
to legitimize invasion and occupation. It is telling but hardly
surprising, then, that as evidence of systemic complicity with
the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison continues to grow, Rumsfeld
& co. have disavowed the abuse not simply because of its
uncontestable and universal repugnance, but because it is particularly
'Un-American.' 'American,' that marker of exceptional morality
which needs to posit itself above and beyond the norm. But let
us examine further this exceptionalism.
To be sure, there is nothing
specifically American about the torture--that the coalition forces
share with those from whom they seek safe distance. But what
about the form that the violence has taken, the specific tactics
of humiliation through humour that seem to speak to a larger
dialogue, and, more starkly, their photographing? There is, perhaps,
something particularly American about the theatrics of capture:
the well-posed snapshots of pain made light through the lens
of the camera. The photographs from Abu Ghraib arguably speak
to the politics of representation that bind together America's
mediatized society; to the cultural systemic. The lens through
which the Iraqi--as 'other'--is viewed, reduced, effaced is equally
that through which the inherently moral 'American' is constructed.
The pictures say it all. Almost
as disturbing as the figures of the tortured Iraqi prisoners
are the expressions of their captors--waving, pointing, mocking,
smiling, in smug condescension. It is violence made all the more
disconcerting because of its perverse parody; its pastiche; its
collage of reality--pain and humiliation--with its staged antithesis.
"In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her
mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the
genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag
over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked
Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their
genitals," Seymour Hersh's New Yorker exposé of the
abuses reads. Through the lens of the camera, the violence at
Abu Ghraib is made not just the infliction of suffering, but
the repudiation of its co-temporal reality; the allusion to yet
dismissal of every sort of victimhood, of personhood, of subjectivity.
The prisoners are mere comic props. Like many things with the
current war, the photographed violence at Abu Ghraib is in the
end not about the Iraqi prisoners at all: it is torture, but
it is not about the victim, and in this lies its piercing degradation.
What is surely startling about
these images is the stark immaturity they flaunt--the viewer
sees them as the captors had them staged: as a mockery of reality.
That immaturity can so easily be transposed into explicit cruelty
is frightening. But why should we think of these incidents as
anything more than the perverse antics of immature young soldiers,
following orders, perhaps, but taking liberties with the photographic
lens? Simply answered, the violence at Abu Ghraib is violent
in its immaturity, its purposive immaturity. It is a humor of
particularism, entrenched in cultural codes and transmitted through
the camera, that at once parodies and rejects its subjects, overrides
them and addresses its own discourse. It is not just torture,
it is performance, and it speaks to the culture of the camera,
as instrument, as weapon, as medium for diminution and distancing.
Your suffering is real only in our world of parody, your pain
extant only as fodder for our photography, our lens, our memories,
our pastiche of you.
A few weeks ago, the Council
on American-Islamic Relations called for official investigation
of a photograph depicting juvenility comparable in tenor, albeit
muted in form: two young Iraqi boys smiling sheepishly for the
camera, thumbs up, one holding a sign penned in English: "Lcpl
Boudreaux killed my Dad th(en) he knocked up my sister!"
An American soldier stands to the side of the boy, to the side
of the sign, grinning, thumb up at his coded victory; souvenirs
of the foray, another snapshot to show the boys at the base.
Numerous such pictures have reportedly been traded alongside
the photographs from Abu Ghraib, like mementos from a college
road-trip: American soldiers grinning brashly in front of mosques,
imitating WWF wrestlers whilst standing in tanks, gloating for
the camera in Saddam Hussein's palaces. We came, we saw, we captured.
The photographs from Abu Ghraib
similarly presume an audience that shares with them a cultural
inside and a common medium of capture. They gesture towards spectators
who may not approve, but who will understand; viewers that will
recognize in these images a macabre imitation of the perverse
elements of popular culture--Beavis and Butthead generalized,
transported, and caught on camera. The possibility of an audience
calls forth the performance.
The 'imagined community' of
recognition to which the captors wave is itself hyperbolized
reality: one fed on easily digestible commodifications of the
war, transmitted through newsflashes in breaks between the unreality
of reality TV. Where is the space for humanistic equivalence
in this world of byte-sized real-time, in this conformity of
easy consumption? Life itself becomes inherently parodic: the
triumph of Good over Evil, Our war, Our sacrifice, those Iraqis--loyal,
troublesome, fractious--you never can tell, We the saviors, back
to the domestic election agenda, if we ever did depart from it.
Throw in a bit of Condoleezza Rice testifying in between--we
must, of course, vindicate the objectivity of our subjectivism;
the spectrum of critique remains firmly grounded in the 'us.'
Iraqis matter to the extent that they fit into the space constructed
for them by the validating lens of the popular media. They speak
when they are supposed to or are silenced by the din of the mob,
beamed across screens in unnerving flashes. At this collapsing
boundary between the real and its mimetic parody, where now stands
the unreal?
That the captors not only performed
but documented their abuses, or, rather, performed with such
particularity because of the possibility of documentation, speaks
to the self-referentiality of the frame: torture is rendered
primarily as a theatric set for these stills of satirized pornography,
their American dramatists posed in the foreground. Eliciting,
perhaps, a suppressed smirk from the audience. Somewhere in there,
the possibility of mimicking an already parodied reality begins
to appear more important than the acts of humiliation themselves.
Is this urge to document and interlocute through the camera,
then, not the most perverse instance of a cultural frame itself
immersed in the Hollywoodization of daily life, of reality itself?
The mediatized insularity of the 'us' has itself created the
conditions of possibility for these images by providing the context,
the discourse, to which they speak. In these photographs we see
uncanny fragments of an unexamined self, and are both repulsed
and fascinated by them.
Abu Ghraib, too, now transposed
into a site of 'us.' Amidst this staged reality, the victim has
evapourated.
There is another photographic
journal of the war--one that posits the camera as lens of cultural
conquest.
Shakirah Esmail-Hudani is a senior at Harvard University.
Email: hudani@fas.harvard.edu
Weekend Edition
Features for May 15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
Douglas
Valentine
ABCs of American Interrogation: Phoenix Program, Revisited
John
Stanton
Kings of Pain: UK, US and Israel
Ben
Tripp
Torture: a Fond Reminiscence
Brian
Cloughley
Where are You Heading, America? Taking a Closer Look at the Patriot
Act
Justin
E. H. Smith
Islam and Democracy: the Lesson from Turkey
Brandy
Baker
Equal Opportunity Torture: Lynddie England, the Right and Feminism
John
Chuckman
Peep Show on Capitol Hill: Sex, Lies and Videotape
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Goon Squad
John
Holt
Fencing the Sky
Ron
Jacobs
The Power of Patti Smith
Brian
J. Foley
Why the Outrage Over Abu Ghraib?
Robin
Philpot
Re-writing the History of the Rwandan Genocide
Eric
Leser
The Carlyle Empire
Ray
Hanania
From Abu Ghraib to Nick Berg: There's No Such Thing as a Good
War Crime
Jeff
Halper
Dozers of Mass Destruction
Joe
Surkiewicz
Inside the Baltimore Detention Center
John
Whitlow
Iraq Goddamn
Michael
Leon
Invitation to a Beheading: Why Bush Should Watch the Berg Video
Poets'
Basement
Krieger, Ford, LaMorticella, Smith and Albert
|