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Digital Cameras Change War Photo-Journalism
prakslash writes "Back in 1945, it took three days between the time U.S. Marines raised the flag on Iwo Jima and the famous picture of the historic moment was published in all the newspapers. In 2004, it took barely an hour before the explosive photos from an Iraqi prison were seen all over the world. This drives home a defining fact of 21st century - the pervasiveness of digital photography and the speed of the Internet are making it easier to see into dark corners previously out of reach of the mass media. As reported in
recent news, some of the most shocking Iraqi photos were not taken by photo-journalists but by soldiers and government contractors who used a digital camera, a CD burner and an internet connection to zip the photos around the world with an ease that has never existed before."
Pictures can be re-touched faster too.
I don't think the pics out of Iraq are re-touched, but the ease and power of photoshop and such is something to keep in mind...
Maybe someone should "zip" them a copy of the Geneva Convention?
Maybe Bush should "zip" away and sign the Hauge treaty?
WTF?! From what I understand, these abuse photos were taken way back in January! That's a lot more than an hour.
What is being said about the shortening of the photojournalism cycle is still true, I just think this is a case of a bad example.
The date of the pictures is a seemingly minor detail, but I think it's very important. Little innacuracies like this perpetuate broad misunderstandings of important events.
-Matt
The Red Cross report didn't have an effect.
The complaints didn't have an effect.
The eye witness accounts didn't have an effect.
A few pictures change everything.
Most people have stronger reactions to pictures than they do to printed words. If the military is going to control the reaction, the military is going to ban cameras.
When cameras are outlawed, only outlaws will have cameras.
They are more controversial and shocking because we are Americans and we preach to the world that we are better than everyone else and then we go and do shit like this.
Just one detail for the freepers out there--the abuses occurred (and the photos were taken) in fall 2003. This is months before the four American contractors were killed and had their bodies burned in Fallujah.
So, if you want to put a biblical eye-for-an-eye spin on this, the Fallujah killings in March may have been revenge for the Abu Ghraib abuses, not the other way around as some folks are trying to insinuate.
Remain calm! All is well!
European and Arab news agencies have been reporting the same abuses since the Red Cross released a scathing report 8 months ago. The disgusting pictures finally made the story too big for the US networks to ignore it any longer.
Arab news organizations have reported extensively on US troops destroying and stealing things in Iraqi homes during search missions. US news also hasn't covered the closings of anti-US publications in Iraq (which set off the current Najaf situation). These are the kinds of stories that the Arab world sees every day. Since most Americans don't see any of that stuff, we have no idea why they're so upset.
-B
Auuugh! Cameras are good! It allows the people to check on what their army is really doing. Don't want embarrasing pictures? How about not acting in a way you'd be embarrased to have the world know instead of confiscating cameras?
-- MG
The problem is the nature of the work in which they are trained professionals.
Soldiers are trained to kill.
I can think of no circumstances under which such training would encourage humanity or civic virtue.
People who undergo the psychological conditioning neccesary to kill, maim and obey orders, aquire the ability to dehumanise the "other".
Under the circumstances, systematic torture and brutality would seem to be inevitable.
The Geneva Conventions only cover POW's and civilians and criminals.
2 07 07-2004Apr17.html
Bush (their Commander in Chief) has SPECIFICALLY stated that some of the people we've captured are NOT covered under the Geneva Conventions, being that they are "unlawful enemy combatants".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
When you have the people at the very Very VERY top trying to play word games with the rights of prisoners, you don't expect the people at the bottom to behave themselves.
It seems to me that, as the 20th century progressed, serving your country in a war gradually became less and less about fulfilling a duty honourably and more and more about dehumanising and destroying the enemy as effectively as possible.
In 1914, during World War One, troops from both sides celebrated Christmas together by leaving their trenches and walking out into No Man's Land to exchange cigarettes and other luxuries and play friendly, gentlemanly games of football (soccer if you must).
Of course, commanders on both sides soon outlawed the practice, but the mutual respect and honour shown by men sent to kill each other was clear. I don't see that sort of respect nowadays.
One of the most enduring memories I have of the Gulf War were pictures of the "Road of Death", showing literally hundreds of Iraqi tanks, APCs and other vehicles that had been reduced to smoking piles of metal by Allied air power. I thought of all those thousands of Iraqi conscripts, sitting ducks in their retreat from Kuwait, who were roasted alive in their vehicles by Apaches and Warthogs who used them for target practice. Even on the news or in the papers, barely a thought was given to those killed: that's how far we had dehumanised those Iraqi young men.
Just in this last month, the US Army has reduced large portions of Fallujah to rubble in order to defeat a handful of resistors. What started when a protest by a few people was treated heavy-handedly has ended with hundreds of Iraqi dead, many of them innocent civilians (yes, innocent civilians; I don't see infants wielding RPGs), heavy US casualties and, eventually, US withdrawal from the area and a "peace" enforced by one of Saddam Hussein's Generals. Yet how many pictures of the widescale destruction caused by US airstrikes or reports of civilian casualties do we see in the majority of our news media? Virtually none.
Honourable combat to faceless destruction in less than a century. Ain't progress grand?
Bottom line is this: if you train people to kill, you preach the use of "overwhelming force", and you channel all their aggression into smashing any resistance into smithereens, should you really be surprised when your dehumanisation of the enemy is so effective that POWs abuse comes back to bite you on the ass?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The shredder is a media-created myth.
And let me see if I've got this straight. Saddam was a brutal ruler for over two decades. He gassed an ethnic minority with gas provided by the US (Reagan was President, Rumsfeld was SecDef) sprayed from US-provided helicopters. Saddam filled the infamous mass graves with Shi'a encouraged to rise up against him by George HW Bush, who left them to die when they heeded him and called on him for aid.
Now, because Saddam brutalized these people, it made it OK for the US troops to do the same thing to them? The general who submitted the report that was later leaked to the New Yorker (Taguba) pointed out that 60% of the people in there were no threat to anyone.
Go spin your wheel of justifications for war in Iraq and let me know what you hit. Remember, WMD is out, and apparently so is liberation, since you don't give a shit about those people.
Apparently it requires military training to know how to treat a human being fairly. Seems to me she should have learned it when she was a child.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Because this is an Islamic culture in which such sexual humiliations are the legal and moral equivalent of rape. Because it speaks directly to the primal, tribal sexual fear of women exploited so ruthlessly by the Taliban.
If Rumsfeld is right, there are more, thousands more, pictures and videos out there, violent and obscene past all description.
If and when you are made to strip naked, sodomized, electrocuted, and forced to wear a dog leash, I hope you enjoy the experience, secure and comfortable in the knowledge that others have suffered far more horrible abuses.
The prisoners shown in the pictures may have committed war crimes. They may have committed criminal offenses. They may be innocent. Until and unless a duly appointed court finds them culpable of specific crimes, they should not be punished. And if a specific person were to be found guilty of such crimes, the US Constitution bars the imposition of cruel and unusual punishment. It is probable, although not certain, that when the Iraqis finally get their country back, their constitution will contain similar prohibitions, if only to impede a future regime's use of torture.
I hate to see news suppressed, but I am forced to admit that when the public gets involved objectivity goes out the window. People are often willing at the height of these incidences to cry for blood without regard for anyone who might be innocent of wrong doing but caught in the middle.
The public should be crying for blood.
I was a medic in Desert Storm. I took care of more wounded Iraqis than all American, British, Saudi, and other allied wounded put together. In many cases, the Iraqis I was taking care of has been trying to kill me a few hours before. Now, I'm not saying that no American soldier ever abused an Iraqi prisoner in that war -- but I will say, quite confidently, that there was nothing like the endemic, long-term, systematic abuse that is clearly going on now. Speaking as a veteran, as an American, and as a human being, I am saying that the people who committed this abuse, be they soldiers, civilian intelligence personnel, or civilian contractors, should be put up against a wall and shot.
And if it hadn't been for the release of those pictures, the chance of justice ever being done (except maybe for a few junior enlisted folks who would have been sacrificed while those who gave the orders got away with everything) would have been roughly zero.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Let's face it, the army aren't a bunch of heroes, they're a bunch of fucking simpletons who can't find gainful employment anywhere else. They are the lowest strata of a free society, and the worst possible people to arm and send overseas. They only reason that they ever are is because they are so worthless that the rest of society is willing to let them die.
A few 'soldiers' you may have heard of:
John Kerry
John McCain
George Bush
George Carlin
Prince Charles
George Bush
David Robinson
Charles Rangel
Dwight Eisenhower
Roger Staubach
Henry Fonda
Benny Hill
Steve McQueen
Sean Connery
John Glenn
Werner Heisenberg
Leonard Nimoy
Some people will never understand why someone would join the military. And that's OK, because there are people who will, to protect your right to be innocent.
I know that this story hints at the biggest issue of the last few days in a coy way, but I have to say something. Karma be damned.
One day far from now Rumsfeld will be close to meeting his Maker, reflecting on his life. At some point I hope he realizes that there was a reason that the Geneva Convention was created. He might note that it protects our troops from torture, and that torture is an ineffective tool to gain information. He might also, for one moment, actually re-evaluate the decisions he has made over the last few years and ask: why?
But perhaps not, a man who shakes hands with Saddam months after he uses chemical weapons on the Kurds obviously sleeps well at night for some twisted reason.
What those soldiers did was certainly wrong, but on the all-time list of crimes possible in times of war, this is a minor traffic violation, not a felony or even a misdemeanor. But the "anybody-but-Bush" crowd is going berserk.
Bush's justification for the war was Iraq's WMD. You'll note that WMD have yet to be found. So, the new justification? Getting rid of Saddam, and closing down the torture chambers and stopping the abuse. Oops, that didn't pan out either.
Are you starting to see why this means something yet?
Full disclosure: I would vote for a slime mold before I would vote for George Bush. I believe he and his henchmen have pulled the wool over the eyes of the American public a few too many times. Also, the fact that he still supports Rumsfeld in this, despite Rumsfeld freely admitting that he withheld knowledge of the prisoner abuse from Bush for months, speaks volumes.
If you were a neocon, you would think of the world in black and white. You would consider American soldiers to be "the good guys", and thus incapable of doing such things. So the idea of banning cameras would never occur to you.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
However, we have to keep in mind that the scope of the problem is very limited to a few people who took part in this whole prison thing.
But the rest of the world has no way of knowing the true scope of this, because the US refuses to let anyone monitor what is going in any of the other prisons (e.g. in Cuba, Afghanistan and others in Iraq). And quite frankly the fact that the US refuses to let anyone monitor what is happening makes it seem extremely likely that this sort of stuff is endemic. If not, then what is the US trying to hid in all those other prisons? Why not let monitors in if they're not committing war crimes in there?
Up until the release of these pics, most of the rest of the world could still give the US the benefit of the doubt, and say well maybe they're not doing anything bad. But with the release of these pics, that is gone, and there is absolutely no reason to take the US's word anymore that they're not committing war crimes everywhere. There is no credibility left, the chances seem pretty slim that this was an isolated incident.
Listen brother, I hear ya, but I gotta call you on what you say about soldiers.
I'm a pretty much full time activists, marched in every rally and honetly man, I cried when the troops went it.
But I've also sat and drank with american soldiers visiting my country and you know, for the most part there all pretty good kids (silly buggers on the piss tho, hint to us servicemen reading this: Dont get pissed and start punch ups in foreign ports, the locals HATE it).
I remeber sittign down with a couple of lonely marines after they offered to buy some of us locals some drinks, and I asked about the backgrounds, turns out alot of these guys come from lower class backgrounds, and do basically believe in apple pie, momma and the american way.
Now this isnt a malicious thing. These guys believe there there to A) Get a carreer which AINT pushing shopping trolleys at walmart, B) Do good things for people.
The problem is , the brass at the top taking these guys honest passion for things for whatever the freakin PNAC agenda or conservative 'one true way' is.
But dont hastle private joe bloggs about that man. Hes just doing his job, and chances are , when he steps off that carrier back home he'll be feeling fucked up and angry.
My generation saw what vietnam and the resulting 'spittin on the soldiers' did to our dads generation. we've been beaten around, had absent alcoholic dads, watched the big daddies in our lives turned into emotional messes when we needed them to be strong for us.
Lets not do that to these guys. When they get off feeling all fucked up and angry, buy the brother a beer.. He'll tell you whats *really* going on, and the peace people will be stronger for it.
*NEVER* forget the human costs of politics. Bother the killtoll of war and the headtoll of an angry unfocused oposition.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.