More essential reading: Susan Sontag has Sunday’s cover story of The New
York Times Magazine. It’s a thoughtful, elegant essay called “The Photographs Are
Us.” Here’s a reminder that at Straight Up, blogged on
the fly (on the gadfly?) — we sometimes log on while still rubbing sleep from our eyes — our
timing seems right even if it somehow keeps us from writing long, considered essays.
In “The Duck in the
Room” (May 7), we wrote:
The T-word — “torture” — was studiously avoided by all in more than three
hours of the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Treatment of Prisoners in Iraq.
Except, that is, for Sen. Edward Kennedy, who forthrightly spoke of “torture and abuse.” The
closest Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came to using the T-word was when he said
compensation might be made to Iraqi prisoners who suffered “grievous and brutal abuse and
cruelty.” By any other name that’s “torture.” The old rule applies: If it walks like a duck, talks like
a duck, looks like a duck, etc.
We cited Rummy boy’s circumlocutions for the T-word: the “terrible activities” for
which, he said, “I feel terrible” as he offered his “deepest apology to Iraqis who were
mistreated.” And the way Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, barely
skirted the word torture — but skirt it he did — by calling it “prisoner abuse” that was
“appalling, unconscionable and unacceptable.” And the way Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy
commander of the U.S. Central Command in Iraq, substituted the word “mistreatment.”
And Lee Brownlee, Acting Secretary of the Army, applying the term “detainee abuse”
that was, alas, “tragic and disappointing.” And Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army Chief of
Staff, offering the summary that it was, not systemic and certainly not torture, but rather the
“inexcusable behavior of a few.” [The italics are ours.]
We are glad to see Sontag’s thoughtful, elegant essay as a follow-up, beginning with her
second paragraph:
The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a
public-relations disaster — the dissemination of the photographs [from Abu Ghraib] — rather than
deal with the complex crimes of leadership and policy revealed by the pictures. … 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.
She then goes on in the third paragraph of her thoughtful, elegant essay to our duck analogy,
citing “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 italics are hers.]
And in her fourth graph, Sontag notes:
Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the
widening revelations of the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere … 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.
When we take the pulse of reality — that is, developments in the Land of Is, as we like to call
it — we get our ideas from the news. In “Chew on This”
(May 11), we wrote that “unspoken racism” was to our mind “a factor in what happened at Abu
Ghraib.” (How could it not have been, given the war climate of demonization?) And we cited that
morning’s essay by Luc Sante on the op-ed page of The New York Times, in which he noted the
similarity of the torture photos at Abu Ghraib to old lynching photos of African-Americans. Both
kinds of photos were, in his words, “trophy shots.” He wrote:
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.
Sontag agrees with Luc Sante, though not by name, in her thoughtful, elegant essay. She
writes:
[T]he 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. … 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 nake mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging
behind them from a tree.
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, reflected a shift in the use made of pictures — less
objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated.
But read her essay. Sontag goes beyond that small modulation (photos to be circulated rather
than merely saved), beyond adducing pornography, video games and, yes, racism, as component
parts of the Abu Ghraib torture orgy. She goes finally to “the backlash” against showing more of
the photographs, to the so-called “assault” on the American public by showing them, to the
“legalistic turn” of declaring them “classified” information, to the claim of “outrage” that the
photographs will “undermine American military might,” which is no more than “the continuing
effort to protect the administration and cover up our misrule in Iraq.”
None of this is new. We’ve heard or read all this before. But, as we said, it’s an essay by
Susan Sontag, which makes it thoughtful and elegant. And though it’s derivative, it’s
essential.
