Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
February 2003
hardcover, 240 pages
$23.00US/$37.00CAN
ISBN: 0-374-24858-3
Read an excerpt
One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. Images of atrocities have become, via the little screens of the television and the computer, something of a commonplace. But are viewers inured -- or incited -- to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer's perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of people in faraway zones of conflict?
Susan Sontag's now classic book On Photography defined the terms of this debate twenty-five years ago. Her new book is a profound rethinking of the intersection of "news" art, and understanding in the contemporary depiction of war and disaster. She makes a fresh appraisal of the arguments about how pictures can inspire dissent, foster violence, or create apathy, evoking a long history of the representation of the pain of others -- from Goya's The Disasters of War to photographic documents of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi death camps, and contemporary images from Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.
This is also a book about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, replete with vivid historical examples and a variety of arguments advanced from some unexpected literary sources. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Burke, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and Virginia Woolf all figure in this passionate reflection on the modern understanding of violence and atrocity. It includes as well a stinging attack on the provincialism of media pundits who denigrate the reality of war, and a political understanding of conflict, with glib talk about a new, worldwide "society of spectacle:' just as On Photography challenged how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others will alter our thinking not only about the uses and meanings of images, but about the nature of war, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.
"Sontag is in top form: firing devastating questions and providing no answers for shelter. She hands us no morality meter." --Neal Ascherson, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Sontag, one of our most perceptive and valiant thinkers, offered a seminal critique of camera-mediated images in On Photography. Now, 25 years later, photographs and video of the bloody consequences of terrorism and war routinely fill the media, and Sontag offers a fresh, meticulous, and deeply affecting dissection of the role images of suffering play in our lives . . . Writing with electrifying clarity and conciseness, Sontag . . . [is] scrupulous in her reasoning and exhilarating in her arguments." --Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Her books illuminate without simplifying, complicate without obfuscating, and insist above all that to ignore what threatens us is both irresponsible and dangerous." --O magazine
"Regarding the Pain of Others bristles with a sense of commitment---to seeing the world as it is, to worrying about the ways it is represented, even to making some gesture in the direction of changing it...the performance is thrilling to witness." --The New York Times Magazine
"Wise and somber...Sontag’s closing words acknowledge that there are realities which no picture can convey." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A fiercely challenging book...immensely thought-provoking." --The Christian Science Monitor
旁觀他人之痛苦 陳耀成譯, 台北:麥田出版，2004
關於他人的痛苦 黃燦然譯, 上海:譯文，2006目錄
关于他人的痛苦
致谢
附录：关于对他人的酷刑
译后记 --hc:"這篇討論到翻譯之道的某些面向 可以參考"
桑塔格：『……戰爭受害者的照片本身已成為一組修辭。它們重申。它們簡化。它們煽動。它們製造了達成共識的幻覺。』（p.17）
『人們熄機轉台，不全因為川流不息的影像令他們淡漠，也可能因為害怕。』（p.115）
並且，『因為戰爭，不論什麼戰爭，都似乎難以遏止，於是人們對恐怖的人禍減低反應。』換句話說，『人並非因為受到數量龐雜的影像衝擊而變得無動於衷 --- 若這是個適恰的形容。令感受呆滯的原因是有所感而無所行動。所謂冷感，所謂情感與道德知覺的痿痺狀態，其實充斥著憤慨與受挫的情緒。』（p.116）
(普通讀者的主觀意見:《旁觀他人之痛苦》 )
-這是蘇珊‧桑塔格2003年的最新論著，也是繼《論攝影》之後，另一部深入探討影像與當代文化關係的力作。桑塔格在書中追溯了現代戰爭與攝影的 演進，近代反戰運動的發展，以及影像與新聞、藝術和文化之間的複雜與曖昧。那些源源充斥於現代生活中的戰災影像，究竟是「記錄了」戰爭的原貌，還是「建構 了」災難的神話？究竟是激起了我們對暴力的厭惡痛絕，還是磨平了我的同情心？旁觀他人的苦痛究竟是為了謹記教訓，還是為了滿足我們的邪淫趣味？觀看這些凶 劫的影像究竟是要令我們堅硬一點以面對內心的軟弱？還是令我們更麻木？或令我們接受生命中不可挽回的創傷？而面對這類由照片所帶來的遠方災痛的知識，我們 又該做些什麼？桑塔格這本書不僅讓我們重新思考影像的用途與意義，更直指戰爭的本質、同情的局限，以及良心的責任等重大議題。
作者簡介
蘇珊‧桑塔格（Susan Sontag）1933年出生於紐約市，在亞利桑那州和南加州度過小學及中學生涯，十五歲進入柏克萊加州大學，隨後轉至芝加哥大學就讀，十八歲自該校畢業，1957年從哈佛大學取得哲學碩士學位。
1960年前後桑塔格開始活躍於紐約文壇，被視為新一代的才女接班人。1963年出版第一部小說《恩人》，贏得名哲學家漢娜�鄂蘭的激賞；1964年發 表的〈假仙筆記〉Notes On "Camp"，被美國新聞學會列為二十世紀一百篇最重要的文獻之一；1966年結集出版的《反對詮釋》令她名噪一時，該書迅即成為大學校院經典，「美 國最聰明的女人」的稱號不脛而走。六、七○年代之間，幾乎每部桑塔格文集都是一宗出版盛事，其談論主題從法國結構主義人類學、法西斯主義、色情文學、電 影、攝影到日本科幻片乃至當代流行音樂，筆鋒所及都得風氣之先，充滿睿智、卓見。1977年的《論攝影》榮獲國家書評人評論組首獎；1978年的《疾病的 隱喻》肇自1975年間她與乳癌搏鬥的經驗，被女性國家書會列為七十五本「改變了世界的女性著述」之一。
除小說和評論文字之外，桑也涉足電影 與舞台劇的編導工作，七、八○年代桑一共拍攝了《食人生番二重奏》等四部電影，並導演了皮藍德婁和昆德拉等人的劇作。1992年出版的第三部長篇《火山情 人》，登入暢銷排行榜，是桑最雅俗共賞的一部作品；而2000年面世的小說《在美國》，更為她贏得該年的美國國家書卷獎。2001年5月，桑獲得兩年一度 的耶路撒冷獎，表揚其終身的文學成就。
譯者簡介
陳耀成，電影導演、劇作家及文化評論家。編導的劇情片包括：《浮世戀曲》、《錯愛》、《情色地圖》及探討港澳回歸的紀錄片《北征》與《澳門二千》；錄像作品包括《紫荊》、《吳仲賢的故事》。
在香港已出版的書目包括：《最後的中國人》（素葉）、《從新浪潮到後現代》（香港電影評論學會）、《夢存集》（青文）、《浮世戀曲：劇本及評論》（[中英對照]香港大學）、《情色地圖：劇本及評論》（[中英對照]青文）。
陳現居紐約，曾於該市的新院大學（New School University）得哲學碩士學位。英文論文刊於網上學術季刊《後現代文化》（Postmodern Culture）。根據張愛玲《赤地之戀》改編的英語話劇曾於2000年春在百老匯外圍公演。
記錄戰爭暴行的攝影，可以導致南轅北轍的兩極化反應：有人力主和平，也有人則要血債血還。戰爭攝影激起了我 們太多憎惡與憐憫的情緒，因為照片確實殘忍到令人無法逼視。然而，我們是否都不該忘了追問：還有哪些照片，誰的暴行，哪些死者，不曾被披露？當代最重要的 思想家桑塔格，以敏銳的觀察、尖銳的批判、理性而不失感性的筆觸，探討影像與戰爭暴力間錯縱複雜的關係。她認為戰爭的受害者、傷痛的親屬以及新聞消費者， 各自與戰爭有著遠近不一的距離，似乎只在最遙遠的異鄉，也就是觀者最不可能知悉的地方，攝影師才能以坦誠的態度呈現戰爭的實相。桑塔格向來觀點犀利，本書 更多了幾分直接而坦率的人道關懷。
中文版的Regarding the Pain of Others，除了收錄〈旁觀他人之痛苦〉以外，還多收錄了一篇桑塔格（Susan Sontag）針對美軍虐囚所寫的專文：〈旁觀他人之刑求〉（Regarding the Torture of Others）。
關於他人的痛苦 黃燦然譯, 上海:譯文，2006 --關於對他人的酷刑在本书中，桑塔格把人们面对于残酷事件所表现出来的这种迟钝、冷漠甚至衰竭的态度，归纳为历史、现实和人性等合谋的结果:尽管“说到记忆，照片有着更深刻 的感染力”，但是“影像的震撼和影像的俗套也是开始变成同一事物的两个方面”，人们的感受力不断地被消蚀，战争中的人民成为文本里的“通称”；在历史上， 人们把“战争看作常态”，和平只是现代社会出现的需要；政府对于本土“残酷影像”的限制，同时把其他国家人民遭遇的痛苦当做一种“奇观和异国情调”来加以 展示；在审美心理上，“人们对于身体受苦的图像的胃口，似乎不亚于对裸体图像的欲求，折磨是艺术中的一个经典题材”，等等。
桑塔格充分地揭示了那些面对他 人痛苦时油然升起的“同情心的无能”和对于因为有着相似感受而被划分为“我们”的群体的不稳定性。最后，桑塔格提醒大家不要忘记在文本之外，“仍有一种现 实独立存在着，不受旨在削弱其权威的企图所左右”，那里存在着正在痛苦着的他人。
Susan Sontag
Second volume of her diaries
In her personal journals, a picture of a complicated, brilliant person emerges (14)Regarding The Torture Of Others
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 Guantánamo 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 naïve 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, ''Salò'' (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.
Correction: May 23, 2004, Sunday Because of an editing error, an article on Page 24 of The Times Magazine today about the photographs of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib renders a word incorrectly in a sentence about sexual images. The sentence should read, ''An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video'' -- not ''that whither.''
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