Iraq is the first digital war, as Vietnam was the first TV war. Digital photography and video, combined with the Internet, add a new dimension to the politics of war because of their potential to disseminate images globally and override the filter the media places on war imagery. As in previous wars, the government has an implicit agreement with the media, and gives them privileged access to the action in exchange for the media's suppression of explicit images of suffering, maiming and death.
Until recently, the media has shaped public perception of the Iraqi war quite effectively. The real price that American soldiers and Iraqi civilians pay on a daily basis remains abstract so long as it remains unseen and anonymous: "two US troops"; "nine Iraqi civilians". The dead and wounded remain hidden. Instead, we are shown the controlled heroic narratives and photogenic images of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman.
In recent weeks, however, the war of images has become increasingly explicit, partly because mainstream media coverage has been forced into competition with amateur pictures and videos. The images of naked Iraqi prisoners changed our received perception of the war overnight and left a sense of sudden transformation. The shock value of these images went beyond their content to their style. The prisoner photos provided a crude contrast to the cool, distant images of the war that we are accustomed to seeing. Instead of a journalist talking over the events of the day, with the skyline of Baghdad behind his head, and the sound of distant gunfire to provide a sense of actuality, the Iraq prisoner photos pushed our noses up against the war.
The fact that many of these photographs were reminiscent of amateur porn gave them an extra twist. Viewers were not accustomed to seeing such images on prime time television: a naked man cowering on the floor before a woman who holds a leash attached to his neck; a man with women's panties on his head, handcuffed to a bed. But the incongruous appearance of what looked like shots from a porn site on the 5pm news also complicated our response to the prisoner photos by familiarizing them.
On the one hand, we were confronted with the worst aspects of the US military's domineering relation to the Iraqi people captured in shockingly intimate and personal symbols. On the other hand, some of the pictures also had the curious effect of diluting their own political impact, because their pornographic overtones provided us with a familiar context that conflated "torture" with something more playful and domestic: sexual role playing.
Over the last two decades, S&M imagery has saturated American popular culture in film, music, fashion and advertising. Handcuffs, dog collars and blindfolds have entered suburban bedrooms and become an only slightly risqué part of the sexual paraphernalia of average middle class America. At the same time, digital photography and the Internet have made a cottage industry of amateur pornography. These trends provided the context in which the images of naked Iraqi prisoners in demeaning sexual poses were quickly reduced from war crime to punch line.
Rush Limbaugh was the first media figure to compare the Iraqi prison images to the content on what he called, "homoerotic websites", and to suggest that the easy availability of such images on the Internet might have influenced the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Ignoring the question of why the homophobic Limbaugh would be familiar with homoerotic websites, his comments set the tone for the sarcastic minimization of the prisoner abuse by other media pundits. Don Imus joked with his assistant producer about being handcuffed to a bed with Deborah Norville's panties on his head. "Would that be so bad?" Within days, the Iraqi prison abuse story became an extended S&M joke.
Reality TV also entered the debate. Commentators wondered if shows like The Fear Factor might have a desensitizing effect; if this might explain the fact that young American soldiers found it amusing to stack naked Iraqi prisoners in pyramids. Again, the media seemed unable to look outside itself for potential causes of the abuse. Internet porn provided the images of torture for the soldiers to copy. Reality TV coarsened them to the point that they could act out these fantasies. Cheap digital photography and video allowed them to produce their own pornography and film their own reality shows.
Then the videoed execution of Nicholas Berg emerged on an Al Queda website. The availability of this video upped the ante for the media. Since the execution could not be aired on prime time television, only the opening sequence of hooded men standing behind the kneeling, handcuffed Berg, reading a statement, was shown. Not to be outdone, the newspapers took a still from a later section of the video, showing the executioner drawing a long knife from his robe. Finally Sean Hannity (of "Hannity & Colmes" talk radio, Fox News Channel) declaring that the American people needed to experience for themselves the real cold bloodedness of terrorism, played the audio track of Nicholas Berg's death screams.
The execution video also provided a new standard against which the behavior of American troops in the prison abuse photographs could be ethically quantified. Which was worse: panties on your head or being beheaded? In two weeks the media — driven not so much by events but by the competitive urge to show more and more extreme images — seemed to be pushing towards new frontiers of cultural and moral relativism.
The drama of the prison scandal was increased by the knowledge that the government had thousands more photos and even videos. Would they or wouldn't they release them? The containment of these images recalled the government's traditional role in "protecting" the American public from direct contact with the unpleasantness of war. Yet the nervous debate about how long this containment could last and if it would be more politically advantageous to release the new images or to risk them leaking out, brought back the sense of a paradigm shift in which the old mechanisms of information management were no longer effective.
When the first digital video of the abuse appeared as an "exclusive" on the Washington Post website — an American soldier with green rubber gloves on, slapping an Iraqi prisoner and then fist-slapping one of his buddies — the media commentary took a familiar form. Video made the abuse more vivid than still photos. Video added a realism and intensity the photos had not quite been able to convey. By this point the medium had truly become the message. A discussion of the ethics of torture had mutated into a discussion of the aesthetics of torture's representation. Which images were more "powerful"? Was photographed or videoed torture more telegenic?
Insurgents have beheaded and mutilated civilian hostages long before Nicholas Berg and the Iraqi war. Prisoners are abused and tortured every day in prisons around the world, including in America. But this is the first time that images of torture, execution, and the violation of corpses have been widely available for all to see. The effects of the images broadcast in the last few weeks are still unfolding, but already their de-civilizing potential is plain. The Iraqi prison images remind us that the level of civilization in democracies like the United States is not qualitatively different from the level of civilization in autocracies like Iraq; any superiority we claim is, at best, a matter of degree.
It is worth remembering that on January 31, 1930, in Ocilla, Georgia, a lynch mob tortured and executed James Irwin, a black man accused of murdering a white girl. While a large crowd of townspeople including women and children looked on, the mob cut Irwin's fingers and toes off and pulled his teeth out with pliers. Then they castrated him and burned him alive while the onlookers cheered. Pieces of Irwin's corpse were then distributed to the crowd as souvenirs. These acts, for which no one was ever punished, were carried out by ordinary American citizens less than a century ago. This incident was not unique. Literally thousands of lynchings took place in America in the early 20th century. During the same period, legal executions were also staged publicly. The last public execution in America took place in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936 and drew a crowd of 20,000 people from five states.
The national dissemination of newspaper photos of the Owensboro execution resulted in the banning of public executions in America. Seventy-four years later, however, the media may be capable of producing the opposite effect. Now that live executions are available to anyone who can do an Internet search, it is at least possible that we may again become as habituated to cruelty and as callous as the citizens of Ocilla and Owensboro in the 1930s. How long will it be before the behaviors that are currently being de-repressed by the Internet and the media become socially acceptable once more?
Opponents of the Iraqi war, of whom I am one, have tended to criticize the governmental control of war images as dishonest and coercive, and to hail the publication of images like the flag draped coffins in the Seattle Times (27 April 2004) as victories for freedom of information. Yet the recent saturation of the media with images of torture and death suggests that unlimited exposure to explicit images may be as undesirable as the complete suppression of such images. This is a difficult and contentious issue, especially at a time when the FCC is tilting at the windmills of "indecency" in the media. Yet Ocilla and Owensboro remind us that societies who make a spectacle of cruelty tend toward barbarism. Looking at Medusa has a hardening effect.
