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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...
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."
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.
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))
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.
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.
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.
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.