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By SusanSontag

Regarding The Torture Of Others

I.

For a long time — at least six decades — photographs have laid down the tracks of how important conflicts are judgedand remembered. The Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one. Photographs have an insuperablepower to determine what we recall of events, and it now seems probable that the defining association of peopleeverywhere with the war that the United States launched pre-emptively in Iraq last year will be photographs of thetorture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans in the most infamous of Saddam Hussein's prisons, Abu Ghraib.

The Bush administration and its defenders have chiefly sought to limit a public-relations disaster — the disseminationof the photographs — rather than deal with the complex crimes of leadership and of policy revealed by the pictures.There was, first of all, the displacement of the reality onto the photographs themselves. The administration's initialresponse was to say that the president was shocked and disgusted by the photographs — as if the fault or horror layin the images, not in what they depict. There was also the avoidance of the word ''torture.'' The prisoners had possiblybeen the objects of ''abuse,'' eventually of ''humiliation'' — that was the most to be admitted. ''My impression is thatwhat has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture,'' Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld said at a press conference. ''And therefore I'm not going to address the 'torture' word.''

Words alter, words add, words subtract. It was the strenuous avoidance of the word ''genocide'' while some 800,000Tutsis in Rwanda were being slaughtered, over a few weeks' time, by their Hutu neighbors 10 years ago thatindicated the American government had no intention of doing anything. To refuse to call what took place in Abu Ghraib– and what has taken place elsewhere in Iraq and in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay — by its true name, torture,is as outrageous as the refusal to call the Rwandan genocide a genocide. Here is one of the definitions of torturecontained in a convention to which the United States is a signatory: ''any act by which severe pain or suffering,whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a thirdperson information or a confession.'' (The definition comes from the 1984 Convention Against Torture and OtherCruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Similar definitions have existed for some time in customarylaw and in treaties, starting with Article 3 — common to the four Geneva conventions of 1949 — and many recenthuman rights conventions.) The 1984 convention declares, ''No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether astate of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as ajustification of torture.'' And all covenants on torture specify that it includes treatment intended to humiliate the victim,like leaving prisoners naked in cells and corridors.

Whatever actions this administration undertakes to limit the damage of the widening revelations of the torture ofprisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere — trials, courts-martial, dishonorable discharges, resignation of senior militaryfigures and responsible administration officials and substantial compensation to the victims — it is probable that the''torture'' word will continue to be banned. To acknowledge that Americans torture their prisoners would contradicteverything this administration has invited the public to believe about the virtue of American intentions and America'sright, flowing from that virtue, to undertake unilateral action on the world stage.

Even when the president was finally compelled, as the damage to America's reputation everywhere in the worldwidened and deepened, to use the ''sorry'' word, the focus of regret still seemed the damage to America's claim tomoral superiority. Yes, President Bush said in Washington on May 6, standing alongside King Abdullah II of Jordan,he was ''sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.'' But, hewent on, he was ''equally sorry that people seeing these pictures didn't understand the true nature and heart of

America.''

To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in awar that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, ''unfair.'' A war, an occupation, is inevitably a hugetapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether the torturewas done by individuals (i.e., ''not by everybody'') — but whether it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All actsare done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts butwhether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them outmakes such acts likely.

II.

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of anyforeign occupation together with the Bush adminstration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the Frenchin Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives. Add to this generic corruption themystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of the countryafter its ''liberation.'' And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that theUnited States has embarked on an endless war and that those detained in this war are, if the president so decides,''unlawful combatants'' — a policy enunciated by Donald Rumsfeld for Taliban and Qaeda prisoners as early asJanuary 2002 — and thus, as Rumsfeld said, ''technically'' they ''do not have any rights under the GenevaConvention,'' and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousandsincarcerated without charges or access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up since the attacks ofSept. 11, 2001.

So, then, is the real issue not the photographs themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to''suspects'' in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from thehorror that the photographs were taken — with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. Germansoldiers in the Second World War took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, butsnapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare, as may be seen ina book just published, ''Photographing the Holocaust,'' by Janina Struk. If there is something comparable to whatthese pictures show it would be some of the photographs of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880's and1930's, which show Americans grinning beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behindthem from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectlyjustified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

The lynching pictures were in the nature of photographs as trophies — taken by a photographer in order to becollected, stored in albums, displayed. The pictures taken by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib, however, reflect a shiftin the use made of pictures — less objects to be saved than messages to be disseminated, circulated. A digital camerais a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, nowthe soldiers themselves are all photographers — recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they findpicturesque, their atrocities — and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol'sideal of filming real events in real time — life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? — has become a norm forcountless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am — waking andyawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspectsof their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life –even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessanthome-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing materialin ''Capturing the Friedmans,'' the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled inpedophilia charges.

An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be captured in digital photographs and on video. Andperhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing,as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographicimages of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexualtheme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. Oneexception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a box, hooded and sprouting wires,reportedly told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. Yet pictures of prisoners bound in painful positions, or made tostand with outstretched arms, are infrequent. That they count as torture cannot be doubted. You have only to look atthe terror on the victim's face, although such ''stress'' fell within the Pentagon's limits of the acceptable. But most ofthe pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked manaround on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on theinmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet — andwhich ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

III.

To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one's life, and therefore to go on with one's life oblivious, or claimingto be oblivious, to the camera's nonstop attentions. But to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community ofactions recorded as images. The expression of satisfaction at the acts of torture being inflicted on helpless, trussed,naked victims is only part of the story. There is the deep satisfaction of being photographed, to which one is now moreinclined to respond not with a stiff, direct gaze (as in former times) but with glee. The events are in part designed to bephotographed. The grin is a grin for the camera. There would be something missing if, after stacking the naked men,you couldn't take a picture of them.

Looking at these photographs, you ask yourself, How can someone grin at the sufferings and humiliation of anotherhuman being? Set guard dogs at the genitals and legs of cowering naked prisoners? Force shackled, hoodedprisoners to masturbate or simulate oral sex with one another? And you feel naïve for asking, since the answer is,self-evidently, People do these things to other people. Rape and pain inflicted on the genitals are among the mostcommon forms of torture. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by SaddamHussein. Americans, too, have done and do them when they are told, or made to feel, that those over whom they haveabsolute power deserve to be humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people theyare torturing belong to an inferior race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts wereperformed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the picturesshow.

Even more appalling, since the pictures were meant to be circulated and seen by many people: it was all fun. And thisidea of fun is, alas, more and more — contrary to what President Bush is telling the world — part of ''the true natureand heart of America.'' It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in American life, but its evidence iseverywhere, starting with the video games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys — can the video game''Interrogating the Terrorists'' really be far behind? — and on to the violence that has become endemic in the grouprites of youth on an exuberant kick. Violent crime is down, yet the easy delight taken in violence seems to have grown.From the harsh torments inflicted on incoming students in many American suburban high schools — depicted inRichard Linklater's 1993 film, ''Dazed and Confused'' — to the hazing rituals of physical brutality and sexual humiliationin college fraternities and on sports teams, America has become a country in which the fantasies and the practice ofviolence are seen as good entertainment, fun.

What formerly was segregated as pornography, as the exercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings — as in PierPaolo Pasolini's last, near-unwatchable film, ''Salò'' (1975), depicting orgies of torture in the Fascist redoubt innorthern Italy at the end of the Mussolini era — is now being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting. To''stack naked men'' is like a college fraternity prank, said a caller to Rush Limbaugh and the many millions ofAmericans who listen to his radio show. Had the caller, one wonders, seen the photographs? No matter. Theobservation — or is it the fantasy? — was on the mark. What may still be capable of shocking some Americans was

Limbaugh's response: ''Exactly!'' he exclaimed. ''Exactly my point. This is no different than what happens at the Skulland Bones initiation, and we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, andthen we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.'' ''They'' are the American soldiers, thetorturers. And Limbaugh went on: ''You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about peoplehaving a good time, these people. You ever heard of emotional release?''

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographsannounce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt ofinternational humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send offthe pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal,you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much theculture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality.

IV.

The notion that apologies or professions of ''disgust'' by the president and the secretary of defense are a sufficientresponse is an insult to one's historical and moral sense. The torture of prisoners is not an aberration. It is a directconsequence of the with-us-or-against-us doctrines of world struggle with which the Bush administration has soughtto change, change radically, the international stance of the United States and to recast many domestic institutions andprerogatives. The Bush administration has committed the country to a pseudo-religious doctrine of war, endless war –for ''the war on terror'' is nothing less than that. Endless war is taken to justify endless incarcerations. Those held inthe extralegal American penal empire are ''detainees''; ''prisoners,'' a newly obsolete word, might suggest that theyhave the rights accorded by international law and the laws of all civilized countries. This endless ''global war onterrorism'' — into which both the quite justified invasion of Afghanistan and the unwinnable folly in Iraq have beenfolded by Pentagon decree — inevitably leads to the demonizing and dehumanizing of anyone declared by the Bushadministration to be a possible terrorist: a definition that is not up for debate and is, in fact, usually made in secret.

The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the RedCross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being inthe wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of ''suspects'' — the principal justification for holdingthem is ''interrogation.'' Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogationis the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.

Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the ''ticking time bomb'' situation, which is sometimes usedas a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general ornonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of ashadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they aresingularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information(whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure. All the more justification for preparing prisoners totalk. Softening them up, stressing them out — these are the euphemisms for the bestial practices in American prisonswhere suspected terrorists are being held. Unfortunately, as Staff Sgt. Ivan (Chip) Frederick noted in his diary, aprisoner can get too stressed out and die. The picture of a man in a body bag with ice on his chest may well be of theman Frederick was describing.

The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they werenecessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions ofreports compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests byhumanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' inprisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a year.It seems doubtful that such reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Riceor Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not besuppressed; it was the photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been

only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and somuch easier to forget.

So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us — as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used tothem? Some Americans are already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war:endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped(which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in someinstances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read: critical of theBush administration's imperial project. For there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeldtestified, ''the reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsiblyand professionally defending our freedom across the globe.'' This damage — to our reputation, our image, our successas the lone superpower — is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of ''our freedom'' –the freedom of 5 percent of humanity — came to require having American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debatedby our elected officials.

Already the backlash has begun. Americans are being warned against indulging in an orgy of self-condemnation. Thecontinuing publication of the pictures is being taken by many Americans as suggesting that we do not have the right todefend ourselves: after all, they (the terrorists) started it. They — Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? what's thedifference? — attacked us first. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican member of the Senate ArmedServices Committee, before which Secretary Rumsfeld testified, avowed that he was sure he was not the onlymember of the committee ''more outraged by the outrage'' over the photographs than by what the photographs show.''These prisoners,'' Senator Inhofe explained, ''you know they're not there for traffic violations. If they're in Cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably haveAmerican blood on their hands, and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.'' It's the fault of''the media'' which are provoking, and will continue to provoke, further violence against Americans around the world.More Americans will die. Because of these photos.

There is an answer to this charge, of course. Americans are dying not because of the photographs but because ofwhat the photographs reveal to be happening, happening with the complicity of a chain of command — so Maj. Gen.Antonio Taguba implied, and Pfc. Lynndie England said, and (among others) Senator Lindsey Graham of SouthCarolina, a Republican, suggested, after he saw the Pentagon's full range of images on May 12. ''Some of it has anelaborate nature to it that makes me very suspicious of whether or not others were directing or encouraging,'' SenatorGraham said. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said that viewing an uncropped version of one photo showinga stack of naked men in a hallway — a version that revealed how many other soldiers were at the scene, some noteven paying attention — contradicted the Pentagon's assertion that only rogue soldiers were involved. ''Somewherealong the line,'' Senator Nelson said of the torturers, ''they were either told or winked at.'' An attorney for SpecialistCharles Graner Jr., who is in the picture, has had his client identify the men in the uncropped version; according toThe Wall Street Journal, Graner said that four of the men were military intelligence and one a civilian contractorworking with military intelligence.

V.

But the distinction between photograph and reality — as between spin and policy — can easily evaporate. And that iswhat the administration wishes to happen. ''There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,'' Rumsfeldacknowledged in his testimony. ''If these are released to the public, obviously, it's going to make matters worse.''Worse for the administration and its programs, presumably, not for those who are the actual — and potential? –victims of torture.

The media may self-censor but, as Rumsfeld acknowledged, it's hard to censor soldiers overseas, who don't writeletters home, as in the old days, that can be opened by military censors who ink out unacceptable lines. Today'ssoldiers instead function like tourists, as Rumsfeld put it, ''running around with digital cameras and taking theseunbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise.'' The

administration's effort to withhold pictures is proceeding along several fronts. Currently, the argument is taking alegalistic turn: now the photographs are classified as evidence in future criminal cases, whose outcome may beprejudiced if they are made public. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warnerof Virginia, after the May 12 slide show of image after image of sexual humiliation and violence against Iraqiprisoners, said he felt ''very strongly'' that the newer photos ''should not be made public. I feel that it could possiblyendanger the men and women of the armed forces as they are serving and at great risk.''

But the real push to limit the accessibility of the photographs will come from the continuing effort to protect theadministration and cover up our misrule in Iraq — to identify ''outrage'' over the photographs with a campaign toundermine American military might and the purposes it currently serves. Just as it was regarded by many as animplicit criticism of the war to show on television photographs of American soldiers who have been killed in the courseof the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it will increasingly be thought unpatriotic to disseminate the new photographsand further tarnish the image of America.

After all, we're at war. Endless war. And war is hell, more so than any of the people who got us into this rotten warseem to have expected. In our digital hall of mirrors, the pictures aren't going to go away. Yes, it seems that onepicture is worth a thousand words. And even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands moresnapshots and videos. Unstoppable.

Photos: An Iraqi detainee at Abu Ghraib: The horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated fromthe horror that the photographs were taken. (Photograph from Polaris); Far left, most of the pictures, like this one ofsimulated sex, seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography. Left, showing the pictures uncroppedgives a different and in some instances more appalling view.; What formerly was segregated as pornography, as theexercise of extreme sadomasochistic longings, is being normalized, by some, as high-spirited play or venting.(Photograph, left, courtesy of the Washington Post); On this photograph, Specialist Charles Graner (shown bottomleft) indicated by a number key who was with him at Abu Ghraib. (Photograph from Guy L. Womack)