Narrowing the Range of Permissible Lies: Recent Battles in the International Image Tribunal

Jim Hicks
Smith College
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
JHICKS@email.smith.edu

I begin with a naïve question. How is it possible that the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs did not (yet) adversely affect the careers of those responsible for the war in Iraq? The photos offer dramatic evidence to the court of public opinion. And the case at hand, at least as prosecuted by Mark Danner, is clear enough:

It has . . . become clear that President Bush and his highest officials, as they confronted the world on September 11, 2001, and in the days after, made a series of decisions about methods of warfare and interrogation . . . . The effect of those decisions . . . was officially to transform the United States from a nation that did not torture to one that did. (22)

Michael Ignatieff, in describing the benefits of truth commissions, suggests that they may at least “narrow the range of permissible lies.”¹ Yet days following his re-election, President Bush appointed Alberto Gonzales to head the U.S. Justice Department–Gonzales, the author of a White House memo describing the Geneva limitations on the questioning of enemy prisoners as “obsolete.” The U.S. press, after the election, widely speculated that Donald Rumsfeld would be a single-term appointee. He was not, and few would cite the Abu Ghraib scandal as an important factor in his long-awaited departure. Condoleezza Rice replaced Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Major General Geoffrey Miller, former head of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, was given command of Abu Ghraib. How could this happen? Perhaps someone somewhere believes they’ve all been doing a heck of a job.

On an apparently unrelated front, theater critic turned pundit Frank Rich has opined that the U.S. public is “living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief,” always “ready and willing to be duped by the next tall tale.” Though Rich’s immediate subject is a fake memoir by James Frey, he uses the best-seller success of this scam publication to decry (or was it admire?) his real target–the “Frey-like genius of the right” and “the White House propaganda operation,” with their “intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets.” According to Rich, Stephen Colbert nailed it when he coined the word “truthiness”; today the public demands nothing more substantial, reputable or real than that. One explanation for the lack of outcry regarding the promotions of the gang that brought us Abu Ghraib might thus be that the U.S. public ingests whatever Bushite is dished out to it. Where there are counterstories in the media at all, they are buried, squelched, or otherwise rendered ineffective.
 

And yet, just a decade ago, things seemed different. Reiterated in most accounts of the war in Bosnia is the claim that photojournalism helped bring the slaughter to an end. This notion is familiar, of course, at least since Vietnam: reporting has been said to set the terms of public opinion, and politicians in the West are often seen as responding to the sentiments of their various publics. In short, the right pictures are worth a thousand divisions. I won’t speculate here about whether the power of the press is in fact so telling; in regards to ex-Yugoslavia, many articles, and a few books as well, have already begun to investigate this issue.²
 

Even before we examine the effects of war coverage, I believe, we would do well to analyze the coverage itself. To my mind, recent war journalism still largely follows representational practices put into place during the eighteenth century–it forms part, broadly speaking, of that literature which, from the nineteenth century on, was disparaged as “sentimental” but which, during the eighteenth century, existed as a complex configuration of psychological “sentiment,” social “sensibility” and philosophical “sympathy.”³ The key question I wish to address is whether a structure of representation which is roughly three centuries old has outlived its usefulness.
 

In a passage from his Discourse on Inequality, one which has become something of a touchstone for contemporary analyses of sentimentalism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau presents “the tragic image of an imprisoned man”–an onlooker who witnesses, and is unable to aide, a mother and child being attacked by a savage beast.⁴ Rousseau imagines

the tragic image of an imprisoned man who sees, through his window, a wild beast tearing a child from its mother's arms, breaking its frail limbs with murderous teeth, and clawing its quivering entrails. What horrible agitation seizes him as he watches the scene which does not concern him personally! What anguish he suffers from being powerless to help the fainting mother and the dying child! (Fisher 105)

As Carol McGuirk has shown, a scene such as this, recurring in more or less achieved form throughout the literature of sensibility, can serve as a key to the mechanics of sentimental display. Time and again its three (or possibly four) subject positions are reinstated, always in the same form, though not always with the same effect. Most fundamental to the scene is the position of the victim, whom McGuirk calls “the pathetic object”; she notes, however, that the viewer’s own role sometimes takes center stage. In fact, she argues that

sentimental novelists following Sterne . . . made the presence of an interpreting sensibility seem more important than the wretchedness described . . . . The cult of feeling, from Yorick on, is characterized by a preference in the sentimental spokesman for props that cannot upstage him. (507)

I will return to the crucial distinction suggested here between value denied to the experience of what McGuirk calls “the pathetic object” and value added to the discourse of the interpreting subject, or viewer. For now, let me remind you that the third position in staging sentimentalism, in Rousseau’s scene at least, is taken up by the beast. A fourth position–or at least potential position–is made necessary by the prison in which Rousseau’s viewer is arbitrarily placed. Although there is none at hand, we may imagine that rescue–and therefore a rescuer–is called for.⁵
 

One way to parse such sentimental scenes may be to consider the intentions that give rise to them.⁶ At a Smith College teach-in during the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo, a sociologist long involved in refugee work was the first to speak. He began by showing a collection of news photos culled from a variety of conflicts during the fifty-odd years since WWII. Each photo portrayed a nearly identical image, a mother and her child, invariably in the midst of desolation of one kind or another. The professor explained, with no trace of irony, that within human rights organizations this image is commonly referred to as “The Madonna of the Refugees.” His intention was not, as mine is, to investigate the representational constraints and presuppositions that generate this image, time and time again. He simply wanted us to think about this woman with her child, to imagine ourselves in her place, and to remember her face the next time that history brought it to our attention. In this case, the time was now: almost as if my colleague had predicted it, the very next cover of Time magazine portrayed a Kosovar Albanian woman wearing a head-scarf and breast-feeding her child while carrying it through a crowd of other displaced people.

Figure 1: The Madonna of the Refugees Time, 12 April 1999

When an exhibition of Ron Haviv’s war photographs, which include some of the most widely-known pictures of the war in Bosnia, opened in New York in January 2001, a single image accompanied the New York Times article publicizing the event. The shot is actually the middle of a sequence taken in Bijeljina, a town in northeastern Bosnia that was “cleansed” even before the first shots were fired on Sarajevo. The first photo was taken from a space between the cab and trailer of a truck where the photographer hid himself. Not long after, the paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznjatovic accosted Haviv and stripped him of his film–one roll was missed.[7]

Figures 2-4: Ron Haviv, Blood and Honey Used with permission of the photographer

The first image shows a woman bending over and touching a prostrate man; the last shows that same woman and man, and another woman, all apparently dead–a soldier stands above them, looking over a gate, not at them. The central photo captures another soldier in the act of kicking the second woman: sunglasses tucked into his hair, he holds a rifle nonchalantly in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Peter Maass, a U.S. journalist who witnessed both Bijeljina and the camps at Trnopolje and Omarska, writes that:

when the call of the wild comes, the bonds of civilization turn out to be surprisingly weak . . . The wild beast had not died. It proved itself a patient survivor, waiting in the long grass of history for the right moment to pounce. (15)

The reporter introducing Haviv’s exhibition commented simply, “[This photo] tells you everything you need to know.”

I believe this last statement to be flat-out wrong. What this photo tells us first and foremost, when it is reprinted by the New York Times along with an article reviewing a photo exhibition, is “read the article” and perhaps “come to the exhibition.” In the context of this essay, what this photo and the Time cover tell us is also clear. The latter image focuses on one iconic, nameless victim in an apparently infinite procession to the exclusion of the other subject positions outlined above, thereby summoning up the very interventionist sentiment–“Are Ground Troops the Answer?”–which its caption questions.[8] The key photo in the Haviv sequence, in contrast, centers exclusively on a different subject position: an act of aggression that is animal-like in both savagery and grace. As an early emblem for the war in Bosnia, this image was used for diverse cultural work, including offering a warning to the U.S. public about the risks of intervention. “What does the earth look like in the places where people commit atrocities?” asks Robert Kaplan, in Balkan Ghosts. There are also reasons why, when confronted with stark images of their military’s interrogation techniques, the U.S. public was in fact not told everything it needed to know. For the moment, however, I would like to stay with our penultimate mediatized war.
 

There exist, of course, alternatives to the thin history of daily newspapers and to the slick stories of government press offices. For example, a group of over 200 professional historians, during the past few years, has been working in teams to write a consensus history of the wars of the former Yugoslavia. One way of characterizing “The Scholars Initiative” would be to say that the project intends to refute the quotation from Simo Drljaca that serves as their epigraph: “You have your facts. We have our facts. You have a complete right to choose between the two versions.” (For more information, see www.cla.purdue.edu/si/scholarsprospectus.htm.) Drljaca was instrumental in establishing a series of prison camps near Prijedor in Bosnia-Herzegovina; he himself was killed during an arrest attempt before he could be brought to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague. In short, the scholars were not the first to offer a refutation. Let me cite here, from a press release, the ICTY’s verdict about the crimes committed at Drljaca’s camps:

Like Trnopolje and Keraterm, Omarska camp was officially established on 30 May 1992 by Simo Drljaca . . . Planned initially to function for a fortnight, it in fact remained in operation until 20 August 1992. During this period of almost three months, more than 3,334 detainees at least passed through the camp . . . . All those detained were interrogated. Almost all were beaten. Many would not leave the camp alive. The living conditions in Omarska camp were appalling. Some of you, perhaps, remember the images filmed by a television team showing emaciated men, with haggard faces and often a look of resignation or complete dejection. These are the images which would make the international community react and are, perhaps, one of the reasons the Tribunal was established.

In some sense, the very existence of institutions such as the ICTY, as well as their verdicts, provide a definitive answer to the militant relativism of the world’s Drljacas. Though courts and historians are hardly infallible, whatever power they have, they are granted.

It is striking as well that the judge of an international court should attribute his very mandate to the so-called “CNN effect”; as suggested above, the verdict by sociologists, political scientists, and media critics on the very existence of such an effect is far from clear. In this case, Judge Almiro Rodrigues, in sentencing five participants in the “hellish orgy of persecution” at the camps, may have also felt it necessary to respond to an essay–originally published in February 1997 in a journal called Living Marxism or LM–which argued that the press reports about the camps were a massive hoax. Its author, Thomas Deichmann, begins the essay with a claim much like the one that introduces the Haviv photo exhibition:

None of the reporters present in August 1992 described Trnopolje as a concentration camp comparable with Auschwitz. But pictures speak for themselves. The general public around the world that was confronted with this ITN-picture interpreted it without waiting for an explanation.

Of course, even a cursory glance at a Time magazine cover taken from the British ITN television footage, or at the similar photo posted along with Deichmann’s article, shows that in these cases there was no need for the general public to wait for an explanation: they were given one with the image itself.

Figure 5: ITN Photo. Time, 17 August 1992

At the bottom right, Time captions their cover as follows: “THE BALKANS / Muslim prisoners / in a Serbian / detention camp.” While locals might grimace at the Balkanism inherent in the all-caps phrase, or at the “ethno-national” identifications, considerable thought probably went into the choice of the phrase “detention camp” as a label for the scene on the cover. Claiming a greater part of the page, and hence of our attention, there is the question, “MUST IT GO ON?” There is a delicate balance here between an implicit call to action (“this must not go on”) and fatalism (“it will go on”), a part of all sentimental representation.

On the relation between photographic images and the words that accompany them, John Berger has given perhaps the most sober and even-handed description:

In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words, which by themselves remain at the level of generalisation, are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph. Together the two then become very powerful; an open question appears to have been fully answered. (92)

In Deichmann’s case a supratitle, and not the image, is meant to do the talking. Here are the details of his claim (offered without substantiation of any kind):

Now, four and a half years later, it turns out that the media, politics [sic], and the public have been deceived with this picture. It is a proven fact that it is not the group of Muslim men with Fikret Alic that are surrounded by barbed wire, but rather the British reporters. They were standing on a lot to the south of the camp. As a preventive measure against thieves, this lot was surrounded with barbed wire before the war. . . . There was no barbed-wire fence around the camp area, which also included a school, a community center, and a large open area with a sports field. This was verified by international institutions such as the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague and the International Red Cross in Geneva. The fact that it was the reporters that were surrounded by barbed wire can be seen in the other film-material that was not edited or broadcasted.

The rhetorical move is familiar to most amateur magicians: if you dazzle them, you do so by misdirection. Here Deichmann translates an argument about events in the world into a dispute over barbed wire and misrepresentation. Certainly both the Time cover and Deichmann’s image were cropped, centered and captioned with a purpose–yet magazine editors, journalists, and photographers do not, at least when they are acting as editors, journalists, and photographers, create the events they portray. The obvious bears repeating on another point as well. As Elie Wiesel, in his preface to a memoir from an Omarska survivor, comments, “Omarska was not Auschwitz. Nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz. But what took place at Omarska was sufficient . . . to justify international intervention and international solidarity” (Hukanovic vii).[9] John Berger remarks:

The photographic quotation [from reality] is, within its limits, incontrovertible. Yet the quotation, placed like a fact in an explicit or implicit argument, can misinform. Sometimes the misinforming is deliberate . . . ; often it is the result of an unquestioned ideological assumption." (97)

A key purpose of this essay is to demonstrate, in photographic records of war, the traditional structural foundations for such ideological assumptions.

But first let me tell you something more about their effects. When I first gave materials on the Bosnian camps to students as part of a “War Stories” course, my idea was simply to “teach the conflicts.” Given that the semester had already provided several occasions for examining the use and abuse of war photos, I felt that Deichmann’s article would offer an important cautionary tale. What I myself read as a relatively sophisticated, and sophistic, attempt, in a Bosnian context, to disseminate the equivalent of Holocaust denial was meant as a window into history in the making–a case where the verdict of the international image tribunal hadn’t yet been delivered.
 

There are no doubt a number of reasons why my students believed Deichmann and discounted, or didn’t read, the other evidence they were given (including coverage of ITN’s libel case against Living Marxism, which ITN won). What I believe their response demonstrates most strongly, however, is the obverse side of the truthiness factor. Today campaigns to discredit the media are at least as powerful, and no doubt easier to mount, than successful propaganda. What strikes me most, however, in seeing the Time cover and Deichmann’s denial together is that both exploit the same representational structure. Rather than Rich’s ready state of suspended disbelief, today we may actually find ourselves trapped in a supersaturated suspension of particulate histories–ready to believe, or not, whenever thew right mix comes together.
 

Bruno Latour is right: it is time for critique to stop fighting the last war. As he puts it, “entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, . . . that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument . . . to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives” (227). Latour goes on to argue that the best critic is not “the one who debunks, but the one who assembles”–that the “question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism” (246). Understandably upset at a family resemblance between his own work and the discourse of conspiracy theorists and anti-science conservatives, the philo-, socio-, anthro-historian of science proposes a reassessment of tactics and a reaffirmation of principles.

 
It should not have been surprising, perhaps, to read Deichmannesque pronouncements about the Abu Ghraib photographs coming from supporters of the Bush administration. Most notorious among these were the widely reported comments of Rush Limbaugh, aired on his radio show in early May of 2004. Limbaugh first apparently claimed that the interrogations were “no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation” and went on to characterize the torturers as “need[ing] to blow off some steam,” arguing that “emotional release” is understandably needed in a situation where soldiers are “being fired at every day” “I’m talking about people having a good time,” he added. A few days later, Limbaugh returned to the topic, this time comparing the interrogations to “good old American pornography.”[10]
 

Given a pre-Abu Ghraib survey which suggests that 63% of U.S. citizens believe that torture is sometimes justifiable,[11] as well as the recent popularity of pro-torture television (e.g., 24 and NYPD Blue), it is necessary to remind ourselves of what Limbaugh’s identification with the aggressors occludes. Let me offer one particularly eloquent example. With great economy and discretion, Jean Améry describes the manner by which the Gestapo dislocated both his shoulders. He also notes however, that the key existential moment in his horrific experience in fact came much earlier. As he puts it,

The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come . . . . They are permitted to punch me in the face, the victim feels in numb surprise and concludes in just as numb certainty: they will do with me what they want. (27)

Améry uses a deceptively simple phrase to describe the transformation we undergo when a regime that uses torture takes us into its hands. What dies at that moment he calls “trust in the world.” We lose, he explained,

the certainty that by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me--more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being. The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. My skin surface shields me against the external world. If I am to have trust, I must feel on it only what I want to feel. (27-28)

In The New Yorker in 2005, Jane Mayer recounts the following:

Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in [C.I.A. officer Mark] Swanner's custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi's death as a "homicide," meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. (1)

Mayer also refers to an Associated Press report describing the position in which Jamadi was killed “as a form of torture known as ‘Palestinian hanging,’ in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms” (7). This form of torture was also used by the Gestapo to simultaneously dislocate both of Jean Améry’s shoulders. And yet, unlike Jamadi, and unlike the vast majority of victims portrayed in the last three centuries of sentimental display, Améry’s voice has not been silenced.

The most sustained and insightful analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos, as well as the most provocative thesis regarding their (lack of) reception by the U.S. public, has been recently published by the art historian Stephen Eisenman. His book, The Abu Ghraib Effect, traces the representational history of a certain form of pathos in Western art from Greco-Roman sculpture to the mass culture and racist subcultures of today. For Eisenman, the Abu Ghraib photographs draw on a mnemonic heritage that has made the inscription of “passionate suffering” a key foundational discourse in what has come to be known as Western art. As an art historian, Eisenman asks how this obvious connection–to works by such artists as Michelangelo and Raphael–were not immediately obvious to his colleagues, and why scholars turned instead toward antiwar representations by Goya and Picasso (or Ben Shahn and Leon Golub) in their discussion of the torture images. Despite topical resemblances that are at times undeniably striking, the latter group of artists, after all, meant to expose and oppose the horrors they depicted. Instead, the tradition which Eisenman dates from the Pergamon Altar (c. 180-150 BCE) through the Italian masters and beyond celebrates the expressive depiction of suffering; its “pathos formula of internalized subordination and eroticized chastisement” functions as “a handmaiden to arrogance, power and violence” (122). According to Eisenman, this insistent attention to one set of artists, and blindness to a more obvious and much wider field within Western visual culture, is evidence of an “Abu Ghraib effect,” a Freudian parapraxis that has largely succeeded in repressing the uncanny doubling between these most recent documents of Western barbarism and some of the “most familiar and beloved images” in its representational tradition.

 
One strength of Eisenman’s argument is that it makes sense of the comments by Rush Limbaugh I cite above–a necessary task since much of Limbaugh’s audience can be assumed to be in agreement with them. After all, unlike Bill Maher or Don Imus, Limbaugh’s remarks didn’t cause him to lose his job. The key elements of the rant–its eroticization of the images, its identification with the torturers, and its imputation of the victims’ willing complicity in their own degradation (“a Skull and Bones initiation”; “good fun,” etc.)–are point for point those found by Eisenman in works such as Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Raphael’s Battle of Ostia.
 

Unlike Eisenman, most critics who write about the photographic evidence of U.S. torture in Iraq follow Deichmann’s lead: they substitute an argument about images for one that focuses on the acts they depict. In a recent PMLA essay, for example, Judith Butler calls an unexpected witness–the then current U.S. Secretary of Defense–to help prosecute her argument with Susan Sontag. Butler opines that when

Rumsfeld claimed that to show all the photos of torture and humiliation and rape would allow them "to define us" as Americans, he attributed to photography an enormous power to construct national identity. The photographs would not just communicate something atrocious but also make our capacity for atrocity into a defining concept of Americanness. (825)[12]

According to Butler, Sontag’s influential writings on photography deny interpretive power to the photographic image. Butler argues that Sontag consistently characterized photography as appealing to the emotions, not the understanding, and that for Sontag, a photograph “cannot by itself provide an interpretation” (823). Butler, however, also cites Sontag’s New York Times Sunday Magazine essay on the Abu Ghraib photos, a polemic that seems to contradict this thesis. That essay, published in as national a forum as Sontag was likely to get, memorably argues that “the photographs are us'” (Butler 826). Butler speculates that “perhaps [Sontag] means that in seeing the photos, we see ourselves seeing . . . . If we see as the photographer sees, then we consecrate and consume the act” (826). There is, of course, a less complicated reading that sees Sontag’s comment directed toward the world, not toward the photos. In a democracy, citizens bear responsibility for the actions of their representatives.

The political and ideological power of war photography, and the limits of that power, has long been an explicit subject of Martha Rosler’s work, from her seminal Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72) to a more recent series of photomontages. Rosler’s Election (Lynndie) pastes the U.S. soldier and her leashed prisoner into a magazine layout displaying an ultra-modern, high-tech kitchen (a selection of Rosler’s images, including both those discussed here, can be found at <http://home.earthlink.net/~navva/photo/index.html>). A city in flames, presumably Iraqi, can be seen outside the room. At some point, the viewer notices the business end of the leash, hidden behind the cabinet, reproduced again on the glass of the oven door, placing the prisoner inside. A second Abu Ghraib photo of a naked prisoner cowering before an attack dog is attached to the door of the oven above. The viewer will also notice photos on the covers of cooking magazines and on files in a recipe rack. A pair of scissors and some clippings lie on the counter, as does an electric green, iconized print of the hooded man photo; a hot pink version appears next to a salad bowl on the opposite counter. On the face of a cabinet is a cut-out quote from the New York Times: “Be Part of the Solution . . . If this election is going to be a fair and honest one, concerned citizens will have to do their part to ensure that every vote counts.”

 
Though he does not say so in The Abu Ghraib Effect, I have little doubt that Eisenman would read Rosler’s recent work as a direct descendent of Goya and Picasso, or of Gillo Pontecorvo, Ben Shahn, and Leon Golub–that “limited number of artists who acted against the instrumental and oppressive authority of the Western pathos formula” (122). In its explicit engagement with both politics and photography, however, Election (Lynndie) also forces us to think about the categorical difference trapped within the single word “representation.” As the legendary French documentary cinematographer, Chris Marker, has commented, “as long as there is no olfactory cinema . . . , there will be no films of war” (“smellies,” we would probably call them, just as we used to say “talkies”). Marker adds that this absence is “the prudent thing to do, because if there were such films, I can assure you that there wouldn’t be a single spectator left.”[13] Though more complex and powerful, the play of irony, horror, and critical distance in Rosler’s image is ultimately similar to, and probably no more effective than, the Ipod/Iraq parodies it cites. Even if, as Rosler’s title suggests, Abu Ghraib alone ought to have changed the past Presidential election, the newspaper clipping incorporated into the work appears more inane than hortatory. Rosler’s masterful assemblage will rivet any audience already convinced of the U.S. public’s complicity, duplicity and complacency; whether its critique gets us closer to the facts, or simply closer to the process of fabrication, is another story.

Although Rosler’s technique in this image resembles that in her earlier work, its effects seem worlds apart. Take, for example, her Vietnam-era montage entitled “Balloons.” In the right foreground, a Vietnamese peasant carrying a wounded child begins to climb the stairs in a suburban home; to the back on the left, we see the white living room with its floral divans and sunroom, replete with rattan swing. In the corner, balloons lie in a pastel pile. After My Lai, and before Watergate, bringing the war home was an essential political move, one that helped puncture the bubble of faith enveloping the Cold War U.S. Balloons‘s ironic title is overpowered by a victim who refuses to be occluded by the sentimental tradition. After My Lai, the U.S. public needed to hear and to see in their living rooms Corporal Paul Meadlo respond to Mike Wallace’s question (“And babies?”). Today another tactic is needed.

We can start with what the pictures themselves show. In a monograph entitled Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo, Keith Doubt cites a rather lengthy passage from Peter Maass’s Love Thy Neighbor which, mutatis mutandis, applies to the torture in U.S. military prisons:

Bosnia makes you question basic assumptions about humanity, and one of the questions concerns torture. Why, after all, should there be any limit? . . . You can, for example, barge into a house and put a gun to a father's head and tell him that you will pull the trigger unless he rapes his daughter . . . . The father will refuse and say, I will die before doing that. You shrug your shoulders and reply, Okay, old man, I won't shoot you, but I will shoot your daughter. What does the father do now, dear reader? He pleads, he begs, but then you, the man with the gun, put the gun to the daughter's head, you pull back the hammer, and you shout, Now! Do it! Or I shoot! The father starts weeping, yet slowly he unties his belt, moving like a dazed zombie, he can't believe what he must do. You laugh and say, That's right, old man, pull down those pants, pull up your daughter's dress, and do it! (51-52)

As Doubt comments, the scene contains, in addition to the torturer and his victims, at least one other representational position, that of the witness. In Maass’s scenario, that position is occupied both by the gunman’s accomplices (it can hardly be imagined as the work of a single soldier) and by the “dear reader” whom Maass explicitly invokes–the observer who is asked to actively imagine him- or herself in the role of torturer.

In many readings of atrocity, including those emanating from Washington, emphasis is placed on aberrant psychology or convulsive histories–the “bad apples.” Doubt, borrowing his analytic frame from Harold Garfinkel, discusses instead Maass’s scene of forced rape in terms of its social context. The passage is read as an example of an “attempted degradation ceremony,” a ritual that involves, by definition, a scene of denunciation in front of witnesses. Doubt observes that, “the denouncer and the denounced do not alone constitute a degradation ceremony . . . . To induce shame, a denouncer needs to convince the witnesses to view the event in a special way” (39). He cites Garfinkel:

The paradigm of moral indignation is "public" denunciation. We publicly deliver the curse: "I call upon all men to bear witness that he is not as he appears but is otherwise and in essence of a lower species. (39)

In his analysis of the scene from Maass, Doubt also emphasizes that the gunman’s attempt ultimately fails, for at least two reasons: first, the gunman himself violates the moral order from which he attempts to remove his victim, and second, the victim has no choice in the matter. He comments that, “if the degradation ceremony is to be successful, the denouncer must show that the denounced chose to be estranged from the values that the denouncer and witnesses share” (40).[14]

The key to Doubt’s analysis, however, is his reversal of the focalization in Maass’s scene. Rather than share the gunman’s point of view, he attempts to give his reader the victim’s perspective.[15] Like Maass, he uses second-person address to produce this viewpoint:

The gunman . . . is not just trying to shame you; he is trying to shame your relation to the world, the fact that you and the world share values, fundamental values such as fatherhood . . . . Only in this way can the gunman . . . presume to be a legitimate spokesperson for the world. As long as the world stands for nothing, the gunman becomes the legitimate spokesperson for the world . . . . If the dignity of the world is to stand for nothing, then the gunman speaks for the world and the world's relation to you, that is, the world's rejection of you and itself. (43)

Using language more typical of existential hermeneutics than U.S. sociology, Doubt sets up here a key analytic reversal:

Soon you begin to see that the world, even more than you, is being denounced. Your role at this point changes. You become not the one being denounced, but the witness to the denunciation of the world . . . . You see the world rather than you is being denounced, and you begin to pity the world. (43)

Doubt sees the former object of attempted degradation as the ritual’s true interpreting subject, the only subject who, in this case, has authentic moral standing.

Much of the world has denounced the Abu Ghraib photos for what they are: a record of beastly, state-sanctioned aggression. They also record an attempted degradation ceremony. For many U.S. citizens, however, the victims themselves have been less important than the faces and uniforms of the aggressors–which poses something of a problem. The evidence that those faces and uniforms present contradicts the a priori positioning of most U.S. war stories. Though it would be absurd to argue that the position of compassionate observer in the scene of sentiment belongs to any one nation, an argument can be made for the peculiarity of the U.S. fascination with this perspective. Certainly the story we tell ourselves about ourselves fits it rather neatly. Isolationists first, then liberators in two World Wars, we have since played the liberation theme over and over again, most notably in the other Americas, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like any compassionate observer, we anguish over the fate of innocent victims; unlike others, we also send in the cavalry.
 

Such stories have consequences, both obvious and not so. One effect of this particular narrative–self-identification in the U.S. with an eighteenth-century construct of compassion–is that the Abu Ghraib photographs were not seen by the U.S. public as the rest of the world saw them. In a sense, perhaps, the U.S. public could not see them at all. If a nation that believes itself compassionate had actually seen state-sanctioned torture, would it have re-elected the man in charge? The photos’ reception in the U.S. has probably been affected by the depiction of smiling soldiers whose good humor contradicts the cruel and degrading actions they performed; two of the photos in which soldiers give “thumbs-up” gestures show a soldier’s smiling face just inches away from that of a dead Iraqi prisoner. These photos can only be described as trophy shots.[16] Unlike the rest of the world, we citizens of the United States of America cannot look on from the point of view of a compassionate observer. We are being hailed by our own soldiers; when someone makes a “thumbs-up” sign to you, you’re supposed to return it.
 

In effect, what the Abu Ghraib photos ask us to do is join the party at www.nowthatsfuckedup.com. Before the site was closed down in April 2006, and its webmaster (briefly) jailed, anyone with an internet connection had access to just the gleeful sort of aggressors community which the Abu Ghraib photographs record.[17] In 2003, a 27-year-old Floridian named Chris Wilson had opened a website originally dedicated to amateur pornography, one where users could gain access to restricted areas either by paying or by sending in photos and videos of their own. At some point in 2004, Wilson decided to grant U.S. soldiers free access to the site, provided that they sent in some photographic evidence that they were indeed U.S. soldiers. What followed? Postings of the charred remnants of Iraqis, or of their mutilated heads, torsos, or severed limbs, accompanied by cold jokes from both photographers and viewers.[18] If, while surfing the internet, it were possible to stumble innocently onto such images,[19] wouldn’t one’s likely response be simply to clear the screen? Such a site would most likely not elicit sympathy, fascination, or glee, but just make the viewer run for the nearest exit. As one of the bloggers remarks in an essay response to Chris Wilson’s site, “We don’t want to know what the war looks like” (Gupta).

 
As for me, at this point I’d like to step back into the eighteenth century again–where, in some sense, all this began. Perhaps the oddest feature of the vignette cited earlier from The Discourse on Inequality is its provenance. Rousseau’s explicitly acknowledged source for his scene of pathos and horror is Bernard de Mandeville (a pairing which, politically speaking, is about as strange as Judith Butler agreeing with Rumsfeld). As it turns out, however, unlike the French philosophe, the author of The Fable of the Bees intended his scene to be ironic. We know because Mandeville prefaces his portrait by giving us a sort of Deichmannesque supratitle–telling us in advance that he considers compassion a “counterfeit Virtue.” He thus intends not to reveal, but to expose. His version of the scene concludes gleefully:

To see [the beast] widely open her destructive Jaws, and the poor Lamb beat down with greedy haste; to look on the defenceless Posture of tender Limbs first trampled on, then tore asunder; to see the filthy Snout digging in the yet living Entrails suck up the smoking Blood, and now and then to hear the Crackling of the Bones, and the cruel Animal with savage Pleasure grunt over the horrid Banquet; to hear and see all this, What Tortures would it give the Soul beyond Expression! (255)

If you find this description only grotesque, and not comic, note the ease with which the word “pleasures” may be substituted for Mandeville’s “tortures” (“What [Pleasures] would it give the Soul beyond Expression!”). Such, for Mandeville, is a clear, distinct and unadulterated example of Pity or Compassion, one with which, as he puts it, “even a Highwayman, a House-Breaker or a Murderer” could sympathize (254-56). That one might well exhibit such virtuous sentiments and yet keep on being a highwayman, paramilitary, torturer or even paidophage, is the Dutch critic’s point. Mine is somewhat simpler: I believe that it’s time to think beyond this obvious, and apparently natural, triad of observer, aggressor and victim, given that its terms provoke wildly disparate and often opposing effects.

Might it instead be possible to create, as Domna Stanton has suggested, “a new interdisciplinary field, one that conjoins the critical and interpretive practices of the humanities with the ethical activism of the international human rights . . . movement” (3)? The necessary steps are rather obvious. Taking the side of Harriet Jacobs against Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Spelman has commented that, “The solution is . . . if possible, to make sure that those who are suffering participate in the discussion” (88). And yet, as a Peabody award-winning episode of the radio show This American Life put it in 2006,

one thing that's just weird about Guantanamo is that in all of these years . . . why haven't we seen more of these guys on radio or TV? Over 200 of them have been released, right? At our radio show this week we were talking about this, and we realized that NONE of us had ever heard or read any interview with these guys.[20]

How many interviews with Abu Ghraib prisoners have you read, seen, or heard? How about Bagram? How about the known unknown locations?[21]

Among the foundational texts for the field that Stanton envisions would surely be Nunca Más (1984), published by the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, a group headed by novelist Ernesto Sábato. Sábato begins his prologue to Nunca Más by comparing the then recent history of Italy to that of Argentina. He notes that, “when Aldo Moro was kidnapped, a member of the security forces suggested to General Della Chiesa that a suspect . . . be tortured. The general replied . . . : ‘Italy can survive the loss of Aldo Moro. It would not survive the introduction of torture'” (1). Sábato’s answer to his country, to a State that “responded to the terrorists’ crimes with a terrorism far worse than the one they were combatting,” was to debunk torture quickly and to assemble painstakingly a report on human rights in Argentina. In place of the military junta’s blather about “individual excesses,” about acts “committed by a few depraved individuals acting on their own initiative,” the Sábato Commission presented a nearly 500-page tome, reporting on several thousand statements and testimonies and referring to over 50,000 pages of supporting documentation. It is nearly impossible to imagine a U.S. novelist entrusted with a similarly historic Commission. But why? Sábato’s prologue is arguably as essential to Nunca Más‘s reception as the evidence it summarizes. His strategy, the argument of a novelist, is to present the Argentine public with a structuralist analysis. “From the huge amount of documentation we have gathered,” Sábato comments, “it can be seen that . . . human rights were violated at all levels by the Argentine state . . . . Nor were they violated in a haphazard fashion, but systematically, according to a similar pattern, with identical kidnappings and tortures taking place throughout the country” (2, emphasis added). The general introduction to the assembled testimony fills in this pattern: its “typical sequence” is named “abduction–disappearance–torture” (9).
 

In the PMLA volume that includes the Judith Butler piece cited above, another essay refers to Myra Jehlen’s suggestion, some twelve years ago, that we study “history before the fact,” i.e., history in the making, rather than “history as the past.” The “prisoner abuse” story is of course far from settled; as I’ve attempted to demonstrate, it’s hardly been opened. Even the trials of Argentina and Chile have not yet ended. The International Image Tribunal has some long work days ahead. One thing, at least, seems clear. No matter what new photos surface, and no matter what they depict, there will be those who wish to see the images themselves as the issue, rather than investigate what they depict. Not long ago, a publication by Human Rights Watch called for a special counsel investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq, in order to focus on the command responsibility of Rumsfeld et al. The HRW report was given the title, “Getting Away with Torture?” To my mind, that’s the question we should settle.

Notes

1. This quote comes from the preface, by Ignatieff, to an excellent comparative study of truth commissions by Priscilla Hayner. Since truth is at issue here, I should add to Danner’s comment a response to it from an Argentine poet, social critic, and friend Judith Filc. “Yes,” she notes, “you didn’t have torturers, you just trained them.”

2. See, for example, the study by Charaudeau and the collection of essays edited by Gow. For an insider’s view that argues against the so-called “CNN effect,” see Western.

3. The term “sympathy” has an even longer and more complicated history; it was also used as a technical term in the Renaissance sciences of alchemy and astrology. Eisenman, in an excellent book on the relation between Western art history and the Abu Ghraib photos (discussed below), traces what he calls the “pathos formula” in art back to Hellenism. Carlo Ginzburg, in an important historical essay on sympathy, goes back to the Greeks as well, beginning with a discussion of Antigone.

4. My attention to this passage results from its analysis by Philip Fisher in the chapter on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in his book Hard Facts. In a conference on sentimentalism at Brown University, Nancy Armstrong commented that she and Elaine Scarry have frequently made use of the same passage from Rousseau.

5. The classic spoof of this structure can be found in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles: “Won’t somebody help that poor man?”

6. I am aware of the long history, and metaphysical foundations, that underlie constructions of authorial intention. My own intention is to focus, whenever possible, on public records of intentionality, and to include evidence of reception within the same general framework, conceiving of the ensemble, in short, as part of “the text.” “A thing,” Nietzsche argues, “is the sum of its effects.”

7. This account, and the photos below, are taken from the coffee table edition of Haviv’s work Blood and Honey.

8. One of the most famous, and influential, examples of sentimental representation with a similarly exclusive focus on the victim is Josiah Wedgewood’s 1788 jasperware cameo depicting a kneeling slave in chains, with the supratitle “Am I Not a Man And A Brother.” See Eisenman (80-81) and Hochschild (129).

9. As for the Fikret Alic, the man front and center on the Time cover, the Deichman article originally claims that his horribly emaciated state was due to “a childhood bout of tuberculosis” (Connolly). This claim no longer appears in the on-line version of Deichmann’s article cited here. David Campbell has authored a detailed analysis of this controversy and its political implications in the Journal of Human Rights.

10. One of the more extensive discussions of Limbaugh’s comments in the mainstream media was given by Dick Meyers on CBSnews.com (<www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/06/opinion/meyer/printable616021.shtml>). See as well Kurt Nimmo’s comments at <www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo05082004/>. References to the remarks can also be found in columns by Maureen Dowd (New York Times 6 May 2004) and Frank Rich (New York Times 16 May 2004) as well as in an article by Stephen Kinzer and Jim Rutenberg (New York Times 13 May 2004).

11. According to a Pew Center poll conducted between 5 September and 31 October 2003 (as reported by Agence France Presse on 17 November 2005).

12. Rumsfeld, of course, was likely to have been less worried about the photos defining America than about them defining his administration. On the other hand, his refusal to release evidence, to confess his complicity, and, in general, the Bush administration’s attempt to pass the whole thing off as the work of a few criminal apples lead much of the world to equate these photos with the country. If the U.S. doesn’t stand against them, it stands for them.

13. “Tant qu’il n’y aura pas de cinéma olfactif comme il y a un cinéma parlant, il n’y aura pas de films de guerre, ce qui est d’ailleurs prudent, parce qu’à ce moment là, je vous jure bien qu’il n’y aura plus de spectateurs.” From Loret’s review of Sacco’s Safe Area Goraude (my translation).

14. As Eisenman point outs, and as Limbaugh implies, central to the pathos formula in works that celebrate torture is an attempt to depict victims as complicit in their own victimization.

15. I came across Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo after reading Igor Sladoje’s unpublished American Studies Diploma thesis, which uses Doubt’s analysis to open an investigation of the U.S.’s role in recent international conflicts. In Sladoje’s opinion, “the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo may be regarded as attempted degradation ceremonies in which the role of the witness to ethnic cleansing, genocide, violence and starvation was played by the world. For this gazing world, the role of the witness becomes problematic. Serving as a witness to evil simply becomes untenable because of the moral values the world claims to stand for. The world can choose to identify itself with either the denouncer or the denounced” (3). Bosnian himself, Sladoje’s text here performs, in paraphrase, the very act which Doubt sees as the end result of the Bosnian war: “Eventually, the roles are exchanged. The victim is no longer the one being denounced; he is instead witness to the denunciation of the world” (3).

16. In an essay written only a few days after the photos became public, Luc Sante calls them precisely that. He also sees a resemblance between the attitudes they displayed and the photographic records of crowds at lynchings.

17. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowthatsfuckedup.com>; <www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/the_porn_of_war>; <www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051008/NEWS/510080427/1039>; <www.indypendent.org/?p=692>; and <www.eastbayexpress.com/2005-09-21/news/war-pornography/>. A selection of the photographs, with an introductory essay by Gianluigi Ricuperati and an afterword by Marco Belpoliti, has been published in Italy.

18. On the “cold joke” and its prevalence in combat situations, see Glover.

19. It wasn’t–you had to either pay, or to play by sending in your own.

20. The show “Habeas Schmabeus” was first broadcast on 10 March 10 2006. Free podcasts are available at <www.thislife.org>.

21. For an important exception to this general silence, see the work of artist Daniel Heyman based on interviews with Abu Ghraib detainees, as presented and reviewed in SMITH magazine.

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