Regarding the Torture of Others - The Culture of Shamelessness

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Regarding the Torture of Others

*By SUSAN SONTAG*

*1*

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.

//http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html?pagewanted=1

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