Antidotes for an Alibi
By Zhanna Veyts
Behrouz Mehri An Iranian couple walk past mural paintings depicting scenes from the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, on a major highway in the Iranian capital Tehran, June 1, 2004 © Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Ge
It will be one year ago, January 13, 2005, that Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, turned over a CD of image files to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division. The CD contained some of the photographs we know to have been taken by American service personnel–its exposure triggering a series of events that led to the public exposure of the criminal acts of torture being committed at his very station.
The guards had used every means available to them (digital cameras, cellular phone cameras, video) to document these acts of torture and to distribute this evidence via email. As a series of digital files, they are just innocuous jpgs found on the computers of family members and friends. But once opened their effect is very different.
19 of the 1800 images were on view at the International Center of Photography in the show entitled, "Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib"–small format, grainy printouts looking just as they would when the jpgs are opened on the computer screen. I stumble into the exhibition, a room placed awkwardly adjacent to the "Looking at Life" show (composed of myriad photo essays from Life magazine that documented American perspectives on everything from politics and war to science and celebrities).
I circle through the small room, aghast, wondering what purposes were these pictures intended to serve? a picture of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with electrodes apparently connected to his fingers; an image of leering G.I.s taunting prisoners, posing over dead bodies packed in ice; a snapshot of a pile of men, hooded and stacked by officers, men who are grinning and showing their thumbs up; a picture of detainees, naked and made to simulate acts of oral sex and masturbation, and many others, too many to list, too many to describe.
Donald Rumsfeld, upon seeing the photos, is said to have responded with awe: "You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable…. It wasn’t three-dimensional, it wasn’t video. It was quite a different thing." He was not alone in his shock. Images today have more power than ever before, not because they expose some greater conceptual truth, but because of the readiness with which they are available (the instant gratification of the camera phone) and the speed with which they are shared (photo albums are just a computer click away). We understand them, we learn from them. This proliferation of images proves that while they cannot teach people to see, they do force people to look. Visual literacy is now a cultural universal. How we interpret images and how we respond to what we see is the real question.
This, in turn, is the subject of the ICP show. Rather than proposing that the photographs take a stand in the "quagmire" that divides photography into either art or journalism, the exhibition was erected for the purpose of documenting an entirely different type of moment in the history of the image.
Rumsfeld’s reaction to the photos had one set of effects in policy (the Bush administration tried to suppress them, claiming a mere "glitch in the program") but quite another in the viewer’s imagination. These pictures spread a shiver of unshakeable doubt through every American that laid their eyes upon them. This social change led the ICP to display them in an art exhibition space. The release of the Abu Ghraib pictures marked a fundamental shift in the way war photography was read by Americans, These are not the images of heroism and liberation that our government wanted us to believe was our mission in Iraq. The soldiers themselves were documenting their activities — the pictures are amateur shots, video and photo that are the stuff of snuff media – saving them on their hard drives and distributing them in emails to anybody and everybody; they were circumventing the very process that is today’s professional media- the process of mediation. Neither the administration, nor the network, nor the sponsors, journalists, cameras, nor anybody else got to intercept the voracious spread of the "inconvenient evidence," nor provide a sufficient alibi for the contents.
The new "democracy of images" does not crop the truth but turns its eye back upon our selves. The photographs, participants-turned-defendants claim, were meant to be part of the interrogation process. They would be used as blackmail. Their contents were something the prisoners would do anything to keep away from the eyes of their families and friends, so, they would be sent back out to collect information for fear of being exposed. That the participants took the pictures proves that they were not hidden from higher-level officials and senior commanders. Instead, they were part of the execution of command to break the prisoners as only seeing the pictures in the act of being taken during their humiliation and torture could accomplish. Susan Sontag noted, in her essay in the May 23, 2004, Times Magazine, "Regarding the Torture of Others": "There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men, you couldn’t take a picture of them." The photograph is the link between the pose and the realization of the command.
Inspecting these small pictures on the wall, I am most disturbed that not only did the perpetrators find nothing wrong with their actions, but they actually wanted to memorialize them as evidence of doing right, of doing good. There is not the slightest bit of doubt in the faces of the soldiers because Americans are good, Americans have no shame and need have none. These pictures communicate a sense of legitimacy and justification, which has been internalized, realized, recorded, distributed, circulated by the perpetrators. What happens when the image moves from being a visual representation to being the cultural representative? While some may argue that these pictures denote singular incidents of war, others declare that they signify a series of policies condoned and encouraged by a government and a people. After all, as civilian attorney Gary Myers noted, "do you really believe the army would relieve a general officer because of six soldiers? Not a chance."
70% of the detainees at Abu Ghraib came to include suspected leaders of insurgency, suspected terrorists that were really common criminals and civilians "posing threat to security". The images tell the larger stories of their subjects: "grab whom you must. Do what you want." As a result, the violence uncovered at Abu Ghraib shined a glaring light on the hypocrisies committed by soldiers from the country that was to be the liberator in the country of need. For every American citizen confronted with the pictures, this, in turn, created a problem of identity, for these pictures now were us. Since the initiation of investigations at Abu Graib, these pictures have turned our eye inward and officials have uncovered that American prisons prove these "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of criminals are not just limited to "prisoners of war," they mirror brutalities in our own prisons, and our own society. These pictures expose and ingrain our actions in the collective cultural memory, one that is constantly augmented by our visual literacy and the constant influx of collected evidence. Harold Bloom has said that without memory, we cannot think. One year later, with these images now a permanent part of our collective memory, what are we thinking about doing? What will we do?
