“I disagree with Phillip Gourevitch about whether the Obama Administration should release what remain of the unseen photos from Abu Ghraib, but he has written this thoughtful Op-Ed in The New York Times today.” - Jim Johnson
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There’s an interesting article about Roger Ballen: Before, During & After Abu Ghraib over at Prison Photography.
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This past weekend, I went to New York for a panel discussion on portraiture, and I managed to attend two extremely noteworthy shows/events. First, I caught the big Gilbert & George show at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s one thing to see their art work reproduced on websites or in books and quite another to see it in person. I find it quite interesting that despite the fact that most of their art is photography based (the individual panels of the pieces are all photographic prints) the show has not been mentioned on any site of the blogosphere: Two of Britain’s leading contemporary artists come to town and nobody finds it worthwhile to talk about it (which I find particularly jarring since each and every one of Damien Hirst’s pranks stunts always gets a lots of virtual ink)? I also got to see Phillip Toledano’s America - The Gift Shop at a place called The Apartment. When I first saw the website I wondered whether all the individual pieces were real, and now I know that they are (and they’re for sale!). I did not buy an Abu Ghraib bobblehead (even though I was tempted), but they’re as real as they could possibly get: They have a “Made in China” sticker underneath (yes, I looked). As Phillip told me, he had everything custom-made in China, and it was great to see the stuff and to chat with Phil.
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There are many different ways to create political art. One possibility is to use a photo shoot to take unflattering images (to thus abuse your client-employer relationship, and to then add insult to injury by saying in public that your employer was stupid to hire you in the first place) and to then deface those images in a Photoshop hack job, essentially creating what amounts to the kind of “art” one typically finds on the walls of public bathrooms. Phillip Toledano knew he could do much better than that and decided to do an installation project, called America - The Gift Shop: “If American foreign policy had a gift shop, what would it sell?” For example, Abu Ghraib bobble heads (like the one shown above).
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“The abuse, rising to the level of torture, of those captured and detained in the war on terror is a defining feature of the presidency of George W. Bush. Its military beginnings, however, lie not in Abu Ghraib, as is commonly thought, or in the ‘rendition’ of prisoners to other countries for questioning, but in the treatment of the very first prisoners at Guantánamo. Starting in late 2002 a detainee bearing the number 063 was tortured over a period of more than seven weeks. […] The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a ‘trickle up’ explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration - by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees - lawyers - who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.” - story
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Another must-read: The woman behind the camera at Abu Ghraib. Noteworthy this description of why the most well-known Abu Ghraib photo is iconic: “The image […] achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability - in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. […] The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure […] as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot - or do not want to - understand about how it came to this.”
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Lynndie England’s bad luck is that the Abu Ghraib “abuses” (if we want to use such a meagre word for what amounts to torture and murder) are still mostly being investigated from the bottom up, with - so the official narrative goes - everything just being a case of a few “bad apples”. The official narrative, of course, is provided by the very same people who are responsible for Abu Ghraib, namely the people who ordered “harsh” treatment of prisoners and who drafted secret memos about how laws such as the Geneva Convention or the prohibition of torture simply didn’t apply any longer. It’s not clear whether we will ever see people like John Yoo in court, just like it is very likely that Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush will enjoy the same kind of elder-statesmen accolades as Henry Kissinger. What is increasingly clear, though, is that the Abu Ghraib photographs will be the defining images of the Bush jr presidency. In any case, in a new interview, Lynndie England, the woman holding the leash in the image above, talks about her role: “Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, ‘Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up’, you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered.”
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“The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. […] The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them.” (story)
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“How would the national debate over torture have changed if we’d known about the CIA tapes all along? How would our big terror trials and Supreme Court cases have played out? Yes, this is also a speculative enterprise, but it’s critical to understanding the extent of the CIA’s wrongdoing here. And we have a benchmark. When the photos from Abu Ghraib were leaked in 2004, a national uproar ensued. Video of hours of repetitive torture could have had a similarly significant impact- the truism about the power of images holds. If we are right about that - and we think we are - this evidence that has been destroyed would have fundamentally changed the legal and policy backdrop for the war on terror in ways we’ve only begun to figure out.” (story)
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The simple principle form follows function can be quite useful when trying to understand architecture: If a building has a certain purpose, then that purpose is expressed via the architecture. Thus, a building that looks like a prison in all likelihood is a prison (even though it might also be something else). As it turns out, in our modern world things appear to be somewhat more complicated. Of course, a confusion like this could mean that applying too simple a principle oversimplifies reality. But we could make things more interesting by assuming that form does indeed follow function and by then asking questions about what we see. Alternatively, we can take a building whose purpose we were told, but which does not really look like what we would have thought it might look like, and start thinking about that. Or, if we don’t feel like theorizing at all, we can look at a building or place and simply ask what kind of impression we get from looking at it. Regardless of how you approach the photography shown in Richard Ross’s Architecture of Authority, you are sure to feel quite uncomfortable about what you see, especially since the journey will take you to infamous places such as the Guantanamo Bay prison and Abu Ghraib.
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“In 1971, 23 American college students’ lives were changed by the now notorious Stanford Prison Experiment. For the eminent psychologist responsible, Philip Zimbardo, the parallels to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib are palpable. In an exclusive Australian interview, he joins Natasha Mitchell, to reflect on the capacity in all of us to commit evil. It’s a case of good apples put in bad barrels.” - story
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“How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its casualties. […] ‘I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.’” - full story
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Antonin Kratochvil (see some samples here and lots of them here) has just published his Homage to Abu Ghraib. I’d probably be the last person who’d want Abu Ghraib to be forgotten, but I’m not sure that creating photos of an event that became known through photos is really such a good idea. After all, the original photos are chilling enough - and it’s hard to see what re-creations add to them. (updated entry)
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“The horrors carried out during the last three months of 2003 by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison are shockingly familiar and, at the same time, oddly remote. […] Beyond the collapse of military discipline and adherence to the basic rules of civilized behavior, Abu Ghraib also symbolized the failure of a democratic society to investigate well-documented abuses by its soldiers. […] Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. […] That is why Salon is willing to publish these troubling photographs, even as we are ashamed to live in a country that somehow came to accept that torture and prisoner abuse were simply business as usual — something that occurs while a sergeant catches up on his paperwork.” - story, with some background and the photos. Update: Salon.com just published 279 photographs and 19 videos ” from the Army’s internal investigation”.
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“With Lynndie England’s conviction earlier this week, nine US soldiers have now been sentenced for their role in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. But is it enough? DER SPIEGEL looks at two lives destroyed by Abu Ghraib. One, an Iraqi community leader — the other, his American guard.” - story
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“In one case - after I did Abu Ghraib, I got a bunch of digital pictures emailed me […] in this case, a bunch of kids were going along in three vehicles. One of them got blown up. The other two units - soldiers ran out, saw some people running, opened up fire. It was a bunch of boys playing soccer. And in the digital videos you see everybody standing around, they pull the bodies together. This is last summer. They pull the bodies together. You see the body parts, the legs and boots of the Americans pulling bodies together. Young kids, I don’t know how old, 13, 15, I guess. And then you see soldiers dropping R.P.G.’s, which are rocket-launched grenades around them. And then they’re called in as an insurgent kill. It’s a kill of, you know, would-be insurgents or resistance and it goes into the computers, and I’m sure it’s briefed. Everybody remembers how My Lai was briefed as a great victory, ‘128 Vietcong killed.’ And so you have that pattern again.” - Seymour Hersh
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“Without a comprehensive, independent investigation into the United States’ torture and ill-treatment of detainees, the conditions remain for further abuses to occur, Amnesty International warned today as it released a 200-page report cataloguing the United States’ three-year descent into the use of torture. The report was released 6 months after CBS News first broadcast the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib. […] “‘Many questions remain unanswered, responsible individuals are beyond the scope of investigation, policies that facilitate torture remain in place, and prisoners continue to be held in secret detention,’ said Dr. William F. Schulz, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. ‘The failure to substantially change policy and practice after the scandal of Abu Ghraib leaves the US government completely lacking in credibility when it asserts its opposition to torture.’ “In the report […] the organization documents the pattern of human rights violations that run from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib via Guantç–£amo Bay and extend to ‘secret’ overseas detention facilities. It outlines how, despite the administration’s claims that the atrocities of September 11, 2001, ushered in a ‘new paradigm’ requiring ‘new thinking,’ the US has fallen into a historically familiar pattern of violating human rights in the name of national security.” (full text here; my emphasis) Update (11 Nov 04): One of the key architects of the systematic and widespread human rights violations is about to become US Attorney General.
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“America is now offering lessons in what little wisdom it takes to govern the world. Confounded in Iraq, isolated from its traditional allies, shamed over Abu Ghraib, soaked in corporate corruption and the backwash of environmental harm, sustaining an uninherited budget deficit while preparing more tax rewards for the rich, as dismissive of the unhealthy as the foreign, as terrified of the unfolding truth as of mailed anthrax, it is a society made menacing by a notion of God’s great plan. America is tolerance-challenged, integrity-poor, frightened to death, and yet, beneath its patriotic hosannahs, a country in delirium before the recognition that it might have spent the last three years not only squandering the sympathy of the world but hot-housing hatreds more ferocious than those it had wished to banish for ever from the clear blue skies.” - Andrew O’Hagan in a pretty harsh piece about the Republican National Convention
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“When he saw the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Joe Darby knew he had to blow the whistle. But coming forward would change his life?as well as his family’s?forever, and for the worse. Because back in his own community and in the small towns of America, handing over those photos didn’t make Joe Darby a hero. It made him a traitor.” - story
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“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. […] 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? […] 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. […] “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. “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’ […] 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.” whole article by Susan Sontag
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“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.” (story) The article end with a quote by Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch: “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”
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On the BBC’s website British photographer and documentary filmmaker David Modell discusses the torture photos from US prisons in Iraq. His conclusion is quite upsetting and provocative but well worth to be quoted in full length: “The pictures from Abu Ghraib are […] not snatched, clandestine images, taken to uncover the truth and disseminate it. In the almost perfect compositions it is obvious that they were taken in a perversely relaxed atmosphere - emphasised by the demeanour of the troops. And this reveals an appalling reality - that photographs are a deliberate part of the torture. The taking of the pictures was supposed to compound the humiliation and sense of powerlessness of the victims. The photographer was the abuser. When we view the pictures, we are forced to play our part in this triangle of communication. […] By looking at the images we become complicit in the abuse itself. It is this that makes them intolerable for the viewer and why they are so destructive to a war effort built on the spin of ‘liberation’.” (thanks, Philip!) Update (13 May): A couple of days ago, Luc Sante in the New York Times discussed the images and compared them to photographs of lynch mobs: “Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy - but isn’t the abandonment of such scruples possible only if the victims are considered less than human?” (story - thanks, Todd!)
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“We went to Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelageÂ… If we don’t tell this story, these kind of things will continue, and weÂ’ll end up getting paid back 100 or 1000 times over.” - ex-US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan Also see “Torture commonplace, say inmates’ families” Update (this is incredible): “As the US military continued to reel from photographs of troops abusing Iraqi prisoners, President Bush volunteered yesterday that Iraq is better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone and his ‘torture cells are closed,’ summoning an image that has haunted troops in recent days. ‘Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer exist,’ Bush said at a rally in Niles, Mich., just north of the Indiana border. The remarks have long been part of his stump speech, but were made just hours after he had discussed investigations into the alleged torture of Iraqis by US troops with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Later, at a stop in Kalamazoo, he again said that ‘the torture chambers in Iraq are closed.’” - story Note how they still call this “alleged torture”!
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