skip to main |
skip to sidebar
103301
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 whither 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.''
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
