|
Regarding the
Torture of Others
By
SUSAN SONTAG
New York Times Magazine, May
23, 2004
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.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html
|
|
