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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...
As a result of the near-instant publishing of "sensitive" materials, expect to see the military prohibit digital cameras shortly.
Yeah, right.
Maybe someone should "zip" them a copy of the Geneva Convention?
Maybe Bush should "zip" away and sign the Hauge treaty?
The Washington Post was allowed to post the Pentagon papers because they had a million lawyers behind them.. If we go to a mostly indy media, can the government harass editors and throw them into prison
If you think this isn't possible, what's changed between now and the alien and sedition act of before?
The first prison photos to be shown on CBS were taken last year .
"Some fight for law. Some fight for justice. What will you fight for? One day, you will see."
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
They're not hard to find.
What's more disturbing are the details in this leaked US army report
It's possible that the presence of the cameras actually made the abusers more harsh.
How many times do you do stupid things in pictures that you wouldn't normally do? When someone points the camera at you and you make a stupid face--would you make the stupid face at that person if they weren't taking the picture?
The same thing may have happened here. The abusers likely got caught up in the idea "this is funny! let's pose them THIS way! hahaha... now let's pose them THAT way!" If the cameras weren't there, the abuse still might have happened--but the abusers may have lost interest in it much more quickly--and thus spared some of the prisoners the abuse.
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.
Was nobody paying attention when Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers and the other Pentagon brass were testifying? The pictures were apparently taken in December 2003, copies passed to Army CID mid-January 2004 and copies were first in the Pentagon around the start of February. Gen. Myers even knew CBS had the pictures long enough to request they not publish, at least for the time being - the potential suppression of the media being something both Senatorial and Congressional committees were quite concerned over. So from the pictures being taken to being front-page news took closer to five months than "barely an hour".
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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!
Could it be because they are in fucking Dubai enjoying all the nice official pictures on those plasma screens?
Or could it be because they are busy sipping drinks at some Hotel in Baghdad?
Or *gasp* could it be becasue they are [in]embedded with coalition forces?
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Yes, today's pictures can be photoshopped, but retouching war pictures or contriving them in general is hardly new. The famous Iwo Jima photo was not the actual flag raising right after the battle, but a re-enactment for the camera (God I hope I'm right about that, actually)
And when war photography first came to the fore, during the US Civil War, photography was treated like paintings, and photos were taken after the battles with soldiers set up in posed, contrived positions because of the long exposure time.
Just something to think about. The camera can be remarkable for conveying accurate truths, or for conveying convincing lies.
Yup...
From an article in the Sydney Morning Herald,
"For two weeks before 60 Minutes in America broke the torture story, it obeyed requests from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers not to run it for fear it would harm American interests in Iraq. The network ran it only after learning that other journalists would tell the story if it didn't.
(see http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/08/10839114 61425.html)
In this case, it was relatively "instant" only once the news was ALLOWED to be let out of the bag.((U+C+I) x (10-S))/20 x A x 1/(1-sin(F/10))
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.
They were soldiers, but they were SPECIALLY TRAINED (as in Advanced Individual Training) in Military POLICE operations.
You see, every enlisted soldier has a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) which is his/her PRIMARY mission. This can range from cook to cop to construction.
Their SECONDARY mission is killing and destruction.
These people failed in their PRIMARY mission.
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.
Here it is, AGAIN!
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894001/
Let me help you with the hard parts.
"There is abundant evidence in the statements of numerous witnesses that soldiers throughout the 800th MP Brigade were not proficient in their basic MOS skills, particularly regarding internment/resettlement operations."
Get that? They did NOT "KNOW and UNDERSTAND their job". That was in the report.
"Moreover, there is no evidence that the command, although aware of these deficiencies, attempted to correct them in any systemic manner other than ad hoc training by individuals with civilian corrections experience."
Not only didn't they KNOW their job, they thought that having people with CIVILIAN training would compensate for MILITARY training.
"I find that the 800th MP Brigade was not adequately trained for a mission that included operating a prison or penal institution at Abu Ghraib Prison Complex."
Again, they were NOT trained.
"However, I found no evidence that the Command, although aware of this deficiency, ever requested specific corrections training from the Commandant of the Military Police School, the US Army Confinement Facility at Mannheim, Germany, the Provost Marshal General of the Army, or the US Army Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas."
Even though their Chain of Command KNEW they weren't trained, their Chain of Command did NOTHING to fix it (above the company level).
"Almost every witness we interviewed had no familiarity with the provisions of AR 190-8 or FM 3-19.40."
They didn't even KNOW the AR's and FM's appropriate to their mission.
"Numerous witnesses stated that the 800th MP Brigade S-1, MAJ Hinzman and S-4, MAJ Green, were essentially dysfunctional, but that despite numerous complaints, these officers were not replaced."
The word "dysfunctional" applied to officers by a GENERAL in his OFFICIAL report.
Now would you care to tell me what "EVERY basic military trainee is drilled on"?
If you did not yet hear about or read these sites :
:
Read how a Baghdad citizen felt about the preparations and during the war Salam Pax - Where is Raed ?.
Read about an Iraqi girl who lost her job and her hope for the future Riverbend - Baghdad Burning.
Read what an Iraqi female engineer tells about what's happening in Bagdad now A Family in Baghdad.
Read what an Iraqi architect has to say Raed in the Middle.
And in a slightly related note
The Stanford Prison Experiment documents an experiment that had to be aborted after only 6 days, because of abuses.
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.
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.
And if found guilty - their service will likewise protect their rights as their sentences are carried out - even if the guilty ones have sworn those same oaths themselves in the past - even if the guilty ones may be on the list you provided.
...
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. Taguba's report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time.
Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
Writing 'I am a Rapest' (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
Threatening male detainees with rape;
Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
They didn't prevent the abuse of prisoners, and you think they would have been able to communicate or enforce a no-camera policy? Have you read the Taguba Report? The whole 800th Military Police Brigade was poorly run from the commander on down. Hardly anyone knew anything about the Army Regulations, the Geneva Convention, etc. that specifically related to their job as prison staff. For example, the prisoners were not even counted as often as required. In addition, basic Army standards - such as the saluting of officers - were not enforced. The environment was ripe for such abuses to occur. I could go on, but I suggest that you read the report yourself.
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.
First - the bright side of thing is that army procedures at least are working somewhat - as in there were actual investigations even without publicity (though when the punishment for what the army itself calls "murder" is just being thrown out of the army and never serving any jail time...). However, this seems to be going on *despite* the Pentagon leadership who tried to minimise their scope and people's knowledge of them as much as possible within the boundaries of existing law and is more a testament to the strong structures put in place by previous Pentagon leaders and previous lawmakers rather than any real care for human rights of the current ones (who probably see them as more hinderences to their goals than anything else). This is why we need strong rights and checks and balances in a democracy. This example also shows the need for a strong free press in a democracy. What we are seeing are that the democratic structures in the US that previous generations laboured to put in place are still working.
Now, onto the bad side.
Personally, one of the things I find most repellent about the Pentagon's reaction to this issue is that they seem to see this more as a PR disaster then a humanitarian disaster. Of course they are making noises about how terrible it was blah, blah, blah. But Rumsfeld also complained mightily in his recent interview about how annoyed they are they are restricted by "peacetime rules" and hence can't control the dissemation of photos and videos on the web from servicemen and so the photos are getting to the media first without being vetted by the Pentagon.
"We're functioning in a - with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
As a result there have been mutterings of increased censorship of servicemen from the Pentagon. Before the photos came out, they tried to suppress the details of the information as much as possible without being able to be accused of doing something illegal eg. press releases released at times they know no-one will be paying attention (an old government trick) with only the barest details (not even the names of the soldiers accused nor any real details of the crimes). Nor was there any attempt to inform Congress at all (even though they were having high level meetings with Congress just a few hours before the photos were published and the Pentagon had known about it for ages as they asked CBS to delay broadcasting them during the fighting at Fallujah). Is it just me, or does *everything* about Iraq seem to shock Congress nowadays? "We didn't know anything!" seems to be their standard response. They are getting to be pretty useless as one of the 3 branches of government. The report about the prison abuses that was leaked to the New Yorker is defined as "Secret" even though the Pentagon admitted there was no real reason for it to be so.
Also the fact that they are trying to pass this off as a few rogue soldiers rather than a systematic problem (which is something their own report and the Red Cross make clear). It almost seems as if the major problem is not that what happened happened, but the fact that the mass media actually found out and are making a big story about it. Now, let's hang some soldiers as scapegoats, make a few noises about "being sorry" and hope it all goes away without us having to make any real changes so we can go back to doing the same thing as before.
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.
I was a soldier for 16 years. Not in the US military, but in my time I've build roads, bridges, hospitals, fed people whose villages were destroyed by a tidal wave, cleared landmines, and been deployed to countries in risk of being over run by their powerful neighbors, but never had to kill anyone. Spent plenty of time carrying a loaded weapon in places where it was a distinct possibility though, and several of my close friends did need to kill people.
.50 cal awake for 3 days, under a degree of stress that someone from a pampered and priviliged existance has trouble comprehending.
Despite what sheltered individuals such as yourself may believe, the military isn't fundamentally about killing people. The machinery and act of killing people is incidental, and subordinate to its primary aim as a tool by which to absolutely impose by a collective act of will an outcome on people who don't want to accept negotiation or rational argument.
Killing is often necessery, and the tools and preparations and training for killing form a big part of military training. Sometime killing happens inadvertently due to supidity, or carelessness or racism, or maybe because some private has been at that
Members of the military are merely a broad spectrum from the society they are drawn from , and there are many very clever, intelligent , funny, caring human beings in most militaries, all the way through to people who really are at the shallow end of the gene pool, are ethically and morally deficient, and easily suggestible. At the end of the day, regardless of their background, abilities, or motivation for joining, these people have given up some of their freedom and human rights, and an unlimited liability to their society, so people like you have the right to call them sick fucks, and sleep in a warm bed safe at night.
To the survivors of some of the places I and some of my fellow soldiers have been deployed to, when option a) was continuing to be collectively abused and repressed by violent thugs, and option b) was for soldiers to drive them away, clear the roads of landmines, and allow the NGOs to start rebuilding their country, the benefits were far more direct and tangible, than inventing a cure for cancer.
The military is nothing but a tool for a government to use, and if you don't like how your government uses your military, and you have the luxury of living in some form of democracy, take a good hard look at yourself, and the government you elected.
Although there are pertubations, democratic countries generally get the quality of government they ask for.
The arguable inevitability of the subjugation of the nation-state to the multi-national corporation is a whole other argument.
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.