A non-political perspective on "the photos"

[Guest]

This morning I read the essay posted below and have been thinking about it on and off since. I hope its content might resonate and cull responses or discussion on the 'non-political' effects of the Abu Ghraib photographs (included with the url below). I've been disturbed since the news broke, but at a level I have not been able to fully grasp beyond the common horror and new thoughts re. the war, Bush, Rumsfeld, etc.

The essay made me recall the first time news photos had a deep and disturbing effect on my psyche. It was during the sixties when I was in high school in Detroit, and police in Birmingham, Alabama let dogs loose on the busloads of "freedom riders", black citizens who had organized for voter registration. People were also blasted with fire hoses set with enough pressure to remove bark from trees. In Selma police on horseback rode into a crowd beating people down with clubs and setting off tear gas cannisters as they rode away. Later four little girls were killed when their church was bombed (among many other church bombings).

All this I saw in photographs in the daily newspaper, Time and Life magazines, and on television. I cannot forget those pictures ever. I think no one can forget these recent news photos. There's an awful power in them that has burned them deep in our consciousness, whatever our intellect might make of them. Sontag's phrase of a "deeper bite" is how I feel now. Someone on a thread mentioned Yeats' line about the Easter Rising, Easter 1916, "a terrible beauty is born"; three of four verses end with that line. The full meaning, repeated, is in these lines:

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats wrote of the effect of "the thwarted insurrection at the Dublin post office -- an ill-timed and misconceived Nationalist siege that resulted in the loss of several hundred lives and the summary execution of the rebel leaders," (from here, including a link to the full poem). I daresay the treatment of the Iraqi prisoners is a "rising" for the U.S.

The photo from Abu Ghraib of the man standing on the stool in a tunic and pointy hood causes an odd irony for me because he is the victim yet his 'costume' reminds me of a KKK member. Big German shepherd dogs attacked the black people in Alabama, yet in one photo the woman who looks like a 'policeman' is holding her dog of a prisoner on a leash.

I only mean to try and express how deeply troubled I have been by this news. I daresay 'we' (as a country) will not know the full effects for years, perhaps decades, or longer.

Similarly, as can be seen on the political threads, the effects of Vietnam are still pervasive and not "finished". There were pictures then too. The famous one of the naked girl running during an attack is still powerful, but it was more powerful when it was then - "today's" news item. It was more "real" somehow, for me and those who saw it "live". I recall the photo as if it were a tragic image from a family album, vs. news or history.

In 1965 I saw Picasso's "Guernica" in New York. The experience of seeing that huge work in person has stayed with me. I felt as if I were in it, in the painting, in the chaos and destruction. I find I avoid looking at reproductions of it in books or posters, but here it is again, though just a bit of a sketch, as an attachment to the essay.

So, I invite you to read this essay now, and ask for anything you might have to say that will help us all take in this change in our self-identity as Americans, whatever the term might mean to you. Many of you know I am a very ambivalent American, that being Mexican is at the core of my self identity, but these latest events, especially through their photographs, force me to admit I am of this time and culture, and it is deeply disturbing.

- Perdita
------------

Photos that will haunt us more than words ever could - Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
May 19, 2004 - San Francisco Chronicle article + pics

 

[cantdog]

I wrote a story once about that sort of effect. A senior in the high school had been slapping around the women he dated to get oral sex. Finally one of the women gets organized to publicize it and stop him. Her publicity efforts only get her sued. But a picture is taken.

The story concerns date rape, which is not really legal rape, usually. And so her date rapist bids fair to get away with it. But the photo has impact. The not-really-a-crime story doesn't cause people to be sympathetic; but the picture brings it home. Suddenly it's something that the women in the town might need to be protected from.

The descriptions in the Red Cross report, while sickening and disturbing, haven't the punch of the pictures. This is especially true with nudity!

cantdog

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It’s funny that you mention that the man standing on the box reminds you of a Klansman. There’s certainly that, but the first thing I thought of when I saw that photo was the crucifixion of Christ. Dressed in tatters, his head covered by that bag, his entire identity has been stripped from him, and yet still we can see his suffering and his humanity in the pathetic yet graceful position of his arms. Like Jesus, he seems to be presenting himself to us, compelling us to look at him, showing us his defenselessness and his despair at the same time. It's almost like he's ready to embrace us, or collapse into our arms.

Had the Iraqi people paid some Madison Avenue advertising agent millions of dollars to come up with an image of their utter humiliation and hopelessness, I doubt they could have come up with so powerful a picture.

For the other images, there are some that just make us nauseous with their cruelty and the fear and horror they capture, but I think what really resonates with us—what makes these photos more than just pictures of prisoner abuse—is the attitude of the guards. I’ve said elsewhere that I think the rest of the World, especially those cultures that have been around longer than the USA, which is just about everyone, looks at Americans as embodying an uncomfortable mixture of innocence and arrogance. We’re innocent in our belief that the world is a simple place of right and wrong, and arrogant in our power and the belief that the USA always has good and righteousness on our side, that everyone in the world would choose to be an American if given half the chance. These can be good qualities. They account for our openness and generosity, our directness and sense of fair play, qualities we've shown in our best moments on the world stage.

But here we see the dark side of those qualities. Here we see American kids--fresh-faced and enthusiastic; the kids next door—playing with the bodies and the dignity of a people from an ancient and proud culture, one these kids neither respect or can even be bothered to understand. They’re kids playing with human beings as if they were dolls, and as if if the kids were mildly psychopathic. This is the dark side of America: casual cruelty, effortless arrogance, using the terror and humiliation of others as an opportunity for some kick-ass pics to share with their buds. It’s the same kind of horror we feel when we read about Columbine or about a ten-year old stabbing another child to death: how easy evil is and how blind we are to it.

I think all Americans--all the world--is aware of our armed strength and the huge shadow we cast. We blew through Iraq without raising a sweat; we can blow through anybody. But Americans have to think of themselves as good people and moral people. It's essential to what we're trying to do in Iraq that we be seen as fair and compassionate and really wanting to help the Iraqis. These picture give the lie to that. Despite what the pentagon says, it's hard to believe that just by chance, six or seven sick, sadistic kids were assembled in one place at one time, that this was some sort of localized moral aberration. We know instinctively that this isn't true: this could have been almost anyone. We look into their faces and see the banality of evil, and it looks so familiar. We look at cruelty and see our own faces, or--worse--the faces of our kids.

There’s another thing about these photos and about war photos in general. Americans are surrounded by benign violence, the kind of stuff we see on TV and in movies. I forget the figures on how much violence we see as we’re growing up, but it’s huge, and no matter how graphic or detailed this violence is, it’s cosmetic. I'm not calling for censorship or saying that it numbs us to violence, but it would be foolish to say that all this spectacle doesn't influence our mental picture of what goes on in a war. Admit it, when you see a smart bomb or artillery shell, you think of movie explosions with badguys flying through the air and Arnold Schwartzeneggar with his shirt in tatters. We go to a slasher movie, and we don’t want to have to listen to a victim sobbing or writhing in pain for 90 minutes. That’s not entertainment. We want violence, not pain and suffering, so it’s easy to separate the two.

But the picture of the man on the box, the image of that Vietnamese girl running naked from her village with napalm burning the skin off her back, or the new pictures of the inadvertent strafing and bombing of a wedding party and the decapitation of a five year-old girl, those are pictures of pain and suffering, which is, after all, the real business of war. We don’t want to see those. We don’t want to think that that’s what we’re doing over there. They offend us and they should. They should offend the hell out of us and we should be forced to look at them every day. It’s the least we can do to show respect to any victim, American or Iraqi: look at the pictures and try to at least share their pain.

I forget who is was--General Sherman?--who said, "It's a good thing that war is so horrible, otherwise we would come to love it too much." The horror of war is something we constantly need to be reminded of.

---dr.M.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Dr. M,
That was beautifully put, I like how you remind us that these are an ancient people who have been on the seat of humanity before our nation was even thought of existing. So much culture came from the lands we consider barbaric. Yet, it is us who are the barbarians.

The picture that disturbs me the most is the one of Lynndie with the gentleman tethered at the end of the leash.
That is a human being, perhaps someones father, brother or son, who has been stripped of his dignity. How humiliating that must have been? How does one ask forgiveness to that tortured soul?

We have become desensitized to violence as a culture. Nothing shocks us anymore. People were outraged by these pictures, but was it for the victims or the abusers making the rest of us look like that? Do we see ourselves reflected in the faces of those Americans?

~A~

 

[minsue]

People were outraged by these pictures, but was it for the victims or the abusers making the rest of us look like that? Do we see ourselves reflected in the faces of those Americans?

~A~

Yes

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Yes

God Min, it took me an hour to read through this.

 

[Guest]

Mab., thank you for your very thoughtful and compelling words. If it means anything, I feel that you understand something of my own experience here. There's an odd irony too in that a Catholic did not think of Jesus in that photo, but a Jew did. I am humbled.

Here is yet another take on "us" through art, by a Brit. I've posted a url to the famous Hopper painting in case anyone needs a memory jar, or does not know the work.

Perdita
-----------------------

All the lonely people - The paintings of Edward Hopper evoke an emptiness that is still pervasive in American everyday life

Jonathan Jones, May 19, 2004, The Guardian

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are fated to join a peculiar class of objects and images for which someone coined the useful term Americana: the quintessential, familiar and recognisable stuff of US identity. Americans have a unique capacity for creating unforgettable visual icons, and here are another set, to join Marilyn, Elvis, the stars and stripes and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

At first sight, the nocturnal activities of America's licensed torturers have little in common with four lonely people with no homes to go to who stretch dead time in an all-night diner in Hopper's majestic 1942 painting, to be seen in an exhibition of this great painter's work that opens later this month at Tate Modern.

But Americans have never looked as lonely as they do now - except in the paintings of Edward Hopper. America has never seemed as baffling and alien as it does at this moment - except through the eyes of Hopper.

The city around the Nighthawks is a green void, its deadness illuminated by the light coming through the diner's glass walls. Inside, one man sits alone in his hat, hunched up, maybe on his way to or from a killing. A man and woman who look bored and uncomfortable with one another - and whose relationship is suspicious anyway - talk to the cook in his white uniform. This is at once a poem to the American way of life and a lament for what Hopper saw as its dismal emptiness.

Hopper was the first great painter of Americana, of the idiosyncratic rituals and customs of his country. A white lighthouse in dead sunlight, a forgotten mansion by the railroad tracks, a shirtsleeved figure at a tenement window - his America is shocking, perplexing and surreal.

It's an empty space even though it has been colonised, a wilderness with gas stations, lunch rooms, movie theatres, store fronts. He both understood and epitomised America's amazing capacity for self-projection, which is closely related to its belief - going back to quick-build balloon-frame houses and interchangeable rifle parts in the 19th century - in mass production. This included the mass-production of lifestyle, of ways of eating and being entertained, and of iconographies.

Hopper painted in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s when a singular, and in many ways extremely seductive, style of American consumerism came to dominate urban and suburban life: you got your lunch at a lunch counter like everybody else. Andy Warhol remembered the simple lunch rooms he grew up with as perfect institutions of efficient solitude; but then he was someone who freely admitted: "I really like to eat alone."

The real astonishment of Edward Hopper, though, is his exploitation of the iconic power of ordinary American things, as if every white clapboard house in his pictures is auditioning for a part in an unsettling national epic, and every lonely person sitting in a room is Marilyn Monroe.

Hopper's America is a cartoon country, caricatured, exaggerated, impossible, and real. He can paint the most banal moment in a Manhattan lunch room, where a waitress works in numbed solitude while the saddest collection of fruit in the history of art sits unwanted on a side counter, and say as much as TS Eliot in The Wasteland.

This is Hopper's genius - but he's not alone. The strength of American art in the 20th century lay in its ability to draw on an instant museum of national weirdness. After Hopper, it was Warhol who saw this most blackly, and it is his art that connects the Nighthawks with Abu Ghraib. In Warhol's Race Riot, a southern policeman sets a dog on a civil rights protester - a sleazy, base cruelty that immediately makes you think of the prison images from Iraq. And of course Warhol painted the supreme piece of Americana: the Electric Chair, solitary and spectacular in the death chamber, archaic-looking, hokey as a sideshow.

What strikes me about the pictures the military torturers have taken of one another and their victims - blithe souvenirs of their own shame - is that, although shot far from home, they are as resonantly, instantly and hyperbolically American as Hopper's houses that all look like they belong to serial killers. And it should not be forgotten that when Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho he copied not only the design of the Bates mansion but its out-of-the-way location, its lonely, meaningless American gothic grandeur, from Hopper's painting The House by the Railroad.

Jeremy Sivins, Lynndie England and the rest were bored tourists torturing as casually as you might order a coffee refill. As images, these inhabit not Iraq but America, and document the underside of the national imaginary just as poignantly as Hopper. Where does this horror come from, its casual and playful quality?

Edward Hopper foresaw the serial-killer settings of a disillusioned national landscape - did he also provide a subliminal iconography for this corruption abroad? Those people too shiftless to be called sadists, occupying the wee small hours as best they know how, look like Nighthawks to me.

Nighthawks

 

[Svenskaflicka]

A terrible beauty.

True words. There's a non-sexually perverted beauty of cruelty.

 

[Guest]

True words. There's a non-sexually perverted beauty of cruelty.

Hamlet?

 

[Svenskaflicka]

Svamlet.

(Swedish word-joke.)

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

“There is nothing so pregnant as cruelty.” - George Santayana

 

[dr_mabeuse]

A terrible beauty.

True words. There's a non-sexually perverted beauty of cruelty.

WIth all respect, I would disagree with this sentiment. "Terrible beauty" describes something awesome or overwhelming. While the picture of the man on the box has a kind of monumental cruelty about it, there is nothing terible or beautiful about the rest of the Abu Ghraib photos. Rather they are mean, tawdry and cheap. The word 'sleazy' comes to mind.

Several people have commented on the photos' resemblance to internet porn, and not just because they involve nudes and sexual humiliation. they have that cheap-thrill kind of gloss to them.

I also reject the part in that article--which is otherwise excellent, by the way--that compares Abu Ghraib to Hopper. In Hopper, everyone is disconnected from one another in a kind of cold neutrality. In the Abu Ghraib photos we are looking at the collision of two different worlds that don;t know what to make of each other, and that is a big source of the shame and the horror to me. The Americans are bound together by this cheap, frat-boy sense of fun and they don't even recognize the humanity of the Iraqis they are humiliating. Yet we can see the horror and terror in the Iraqi's faces and attitudes.

More than Hopper, the pictures make me think of Auschwitz, of the piles of bodies stacked like cordwood. Of course, I'm not comparing the level of the the atrocities in Abu Ghraib with a Nazi extermination camp, but the same denial of humanity is present in both: people are objects. The atroctities in Auschwitz were in an entirely different league, but at least in those photos we don't have to deal with German guards grinning at the camera.

---dr.M.

 

[MathGirl]

I forget who is was--General Sherman?--who said, "It's a good thing that war is so horrible, otherwise we would come to love it too much."

Dear Dr M,
I forget the guy's name, but he had a white beard and rode a hoss named Traveller.
Yee Haw,
MG

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

... that is a big source of the shame and the horror to me. The Americans are bound together by this cheap, frat-boy sense of fun and they don't even recognize the humanity of the Iraqis they are humiliating. Yet we can see the horror and terror in the Iraqi's faces and attitudes...
---dr.M.

Doc.

Naturally, different people will read different things into any photograph, and perhaps new evidence will prove me dead wrong, but I had a different initial reaction.

Rather than seeing frat-boys having fun, I initially saw in the photographs frat pledges inflicting humiliation upon others to appease their fraternity judges.

Possibly, I preferred to “see” that, than any other interpretation

It was because, almost every photo I saw with an American solder in it – whatever else they were doing – had turned their face toward the camera with a big cheesy grin, as though seeking approbation.

I imagine that is why the photos affected me so greatly. I had certainly seen enough porn not to be offended, but there were three things that the Abu Ghraib photographs show that especially disturbed me, then, and now. (1) They are of both REAL and non consensual torture. (2) The American Military is involved. (3) The individual soldiers appear to be looking out from the photograph at the viewer, as though they are seeking MY approval.

A dumb response perhaps, but that was my first reaction, which I still cannot completely discount it.

Oh, and I also disagree about the collision of worlds who don't know what to make of each other. From my view, these photographs betray people - not necessarily the soldiers involved - who have cared to discover exactly what social and psychological weaknesses must be attacked, to make their torture most effective.

 

[MathGirl]

oops

 

[Liar]

We have become desensitized to violence as a culture. Nothing shocks us anymore. People were outraged by these pictures, but was it for the victims or the abusers making the rest of us look like that? Do we see ourselves reflected in the faces of those Americans?

~A~

Long post, late at night, bear with me.

I am not an american, and those pictures made me outraged for a very disturbing personal reason.

It is not just this atrocity, but several others that I have seen on the news, and some that I have been a closer witness too.

Here's an example: I work at a major Swedish website. One of my duties here is to maintain activity logs on what users do on out servers. last summer we were contacted by the police, who suspected that some users had used our network to traffic child pornography. So I set out to go through the backlogs, chached files and such. And I found what the police were looking for. Not much, only fifteen pictures, but they could be linked to registered users on our site, who were charged and convicted for spreading that, and much more. So that was good. What wasn't good was the the experience of knowing how I reacted while looking at those pictures.

Pictures of children.
Getting raped.

At first, it was chock and disgust. And then the impact of what I saw must have burned a hole somewhere in my head, because the next thing I started to think about was "Huh. What cameras produces that kind of flare effect?". Here was a scene of absolute evil, and I didn't feel the urge to punch someone's face in, but was annoyed by the amateur documentation. What the fuck? To tell you the truth, I am today almost equally disgusted by the content of those photos as my reaction on them.

I had a similar kind of reaction when watching dead bodies float in a muddy central african river on TV during the Rwanda genocides, visiting Bosnian mass graves and old nazi concentration camps. And now this, finding myself looking at the estethic composition values of some of the photos (in parallell to being appropriately outraged). And over and over I kept asking myself: What is wrong with me? Am I really that fucking jaded?

The events, the actual deeds are one thing. And of course I was, and am upset by those. But actually facing it visually... it is a test, of everyone who sees those pictures, to clear one's mind, and listen to what one's guts are telling when looking.

To me those pictures speak not that much about americans, but of humans in general. Either in the revelation or reminder of how gleefully cruel the most ordinary person can get in the wrong place and time, or in how they are nseen by us, the rest of the western world. Those pictures reminded me of a side of me that I wished I had forgotten.

#L

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Dear Dr M,
I forget the guy's name, but he had a white beard and rode a hoss named Traveller.
Yee Haw,
MG

Sherman, Lee... What's the diff?

---dr.M.

 

[shereads]

The essay made me recall the first time news photos had a deep and disturbing effect on my psyche. It was during the sixties when I was in high school in Detroit, and police in Birmingham, Alabama let dogs loose on the busloads of "freedom riders", black citizens who had organized for voter registration. People were also blasted with fire hoses set with enough pressure to remove bark from trees. In Selma police on horseback rode into a crowd beating people down with clubs and setting off tear gas cannisters as they rode away. Later four little girls were killed when their church was bombed (among many other church bombings).

This is the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision that struck down "separate but equal" schools in the South that were separate but certainly not equal. Not that it changed things very quickly; I was in junior high school in the seventies, and it was all-white until a court ordered desegration went into effect.

I wish I could convey the wierd mood on the day the parents of little white girls sent us marching to what our moms and dads were convinced was Our Doom at the newly desegrated school a few miles away. Some of us were scared to death, we'd been so aware of the battle to keep us "safe" in our own school - and our parents were so upset, and there had to be some reason. I knew better, because I'd been in Air Force schools up until a few years before and there had been minority kids in my classes, and no one had given it a second thought. But this was the first mingling of two alien cultures in a town that had resisted desegregation for twenty years. I remember that somebody in the hallway had a radio turned to "ABC" by the Jackson Five. I don't remember any faces because I didn't look up, just walked up the hall clutching my books like armor. It took weeks to feel comfortable, and still nobody talked to anyone of another color, or shared a table at lunch. That took another year or two.

Here's the picture I wish someone had taken that day: word spread in the afternoon that a white cross had been erected in front of the school. Anyone who lived in the South then knew what that meant: Ku Klux Klan, and they'd be back that night to burn the cross.

Parents were called to come pick up their children, classes were called off, and hundreds of black and white kids stood quiet as mice on the front walk waiting for buses and cars and rescue from the riot that was expected in response.

Then one of the parents arrived, who had driven past the white cross at the end of the long school driveway, and told us it was the empty frame for one of those signs that Chambers of Commerce post when you're enteriing a small town - they put Jaycees and Chamber badges on them, but this one was new and still empty.

We still got to go home, and it was a blast.

My mom and dad didn't think it was funny, but I did.



Sadly, there's a chart in this week's Newsweek magazine article about Brown v. that shows we've come full circle. Public schools have seen "white flight" to the extent that they are almost as racially unmixed as they were back then.

 

[minsue]

To me those pictures speak not that much about americans, but of humans in general. Either in the revelation or reminder of how gleefully cruel the most ordinary person can get in the wrong place and time, or in how they are nseen by us, the rest of the western world. Those pictures reminded me of a side of me that I wished I had forgotten.

#L

Well said.

J/A, and anyone else who wonders, I have too much to say on this topic and it's all quite painful. Apologies for the too-brief replies. I won't speak on it, but I can't let it go by without reply either.

 

[Virtual_Burlesque]

...To tell you the truth, I am today almost equally disgusted by the content of those photos as my reaction ... I kept asking myself: What is wrong with me? Am I really that fucking jaded? ... Those pictures reminded me of a side of me that I wished I had forgotten. #L

I would not be too upset by your reaction to pictures of violence, if I were you.

People tend to use any defense mechanism they can, to protect themselves when reality gets too intense, or real.

It sounds to me, like you were using your photographic expertise to distract yourself from a very disagreeable reality. It did not keep you from recognizing the tragedy of what you were observing, nor of appreciating later the true reaction that you ”should” have felt.

I wouldn’t beat myself up for what was a completely understandable human reaction.

 

[shereads]

But the picture of the man on the box, the image of that Vietnamese girl running naked from her village with napalm burning the skin off her back, or the new pictures of the inadvertent strafing and bombing of a wedding party and the decapitation of a five year-old girl, those are pictures of pain and suffering, which is, after all, the real business of war. We don’t want to see those. We don’t want to think that that’s what we’re doing over there. They offend us and they should. They should offend the hell out of us and we should be forced to look at them every day. It’s the least we can do to show respect to any victim, American or Iraqi: look at the pictures and try to at least share their pain.

I forget who is was--General Sherman?--who said, "It's a good thing that war is so horrible, otherwise we would come to love it too much." The horror of war is something we constantly need to be reminded of.

---dr.M.

Bumping this because it's so important, and so beautifully expressed. Thank you.

In the first two weeks of the Iraq war, when most Americans were still congratulating themselves and the most frequent image seen here was the toppled statue, I clicked on a link at Salon.com that I had no idea would affect me as it did. Salon had collected photographs of civilian deaths that had been published in foreign newspapers. Readers were asked to look, for the reasons outlined so effectively in your post - and to question why we don't demand that our own media publish these images as they published the horror of the war in Vietnam.

I clicked on the link and looked at two pictures. The second one made me physically sick. It was the face of a young boy, maybe eight or nine years old, who looked as if he were sleeping. It took a few seconds to register that the face was attached to nothing. The head was blown away, the body was gone. There was only the face of this innocent child. A child I helped kill. I had a duty to look, but I couldn't. Having the luxury of closing the link felt like the worst cowardice, a final insult to that little boy.

I didn't watch the Nick Berg beheading. What point is there in seeing what's being done to us by others, when we aren't willing to confront what's being done in our name?

 

[A7inchPhildo]

Such a conflict. Who is right, and what have we done? Shall we learn from our past? And if so what exactly did we learn, and how will we apply it to our future?

Script and images tell a story, but do they tell the whole story? I can not gather a reply of what is right or wrong I would need to know what are the instances that expidite such thoughts, and images. Each person deems there own feelings from sights, thoughts, feelings, sounds, smells, touch.

Was there ever any doubt there would be innocent blood shed with any war? Unless you are there don't be so fast to throw stones from what the media portrays. I don't feel all is just and moral, but niether will I take the excerpt of a few instances to make a mindful decision on what has been acomplished. Never mind to place a few images to depict the truth of the situation. Be it then or now one persons veiw is not conclusive.

I look at the images and wonder, the black robe standing alone on a box. Very little doubt of a reference to the KKK and the harsh brutality they inflicted on so many innocent people. Not so much today as but as short time in history ago.

Would it be wrong to think that image implies the USA stands alone as the world Judges the countries actions as a vicious cruel vigilante group?

So be it!

Not long ago on a september morning I would gladly have given my life in trade for a special someone.

Yep, the treatment of the Iraqi prisoners looks poor. You just remember those thoughts when the soldiers come home in body bags from wreckless attacks against them.

Just my closed minded thoughts, but any one who doesn't like it, why don't you go over there personally and straiten it out? Just a hunch but I would have to guess it won't take you too long to look at things differently when it is no longer just a picture.
Psst: If you can't afford the plane ticket, let me know.

I am not heartless to the innocent lives, or the brutality of other humans. But I would rather be fucked up the ass with a branding iron than have another person play it off as the Iraqi goverment was better off left alone for the peace of the world.

Personally I don't really care what reason was given to take Sadam out of control. It still was 15 years too late! Better late than never really sucks!

BTW I guess when Iraq felt the need to attack Kuait. They had better means of caring for the prisoners? Oh wait they had the take no prisoners rule in effect.

Fuck me! The cruel Americans didn't purposely kill every civilian and soldier. I can see why now we look so bad for the harsh conditions.