Battle of the Photographs

The war of guns is only part of any great military enterprise. It is always supplemented by a war of words and, in the modern world, a war of images. The Bush administration, despite the savvy of its spinmeisters and Hollywood-trained publicists, has lost the war of images abroad. Although it has had more success in managing war images at home, cracks have increasingly opened up on the domestic front as well.

The graphic photos of abused Iraqi prisoners released on CBS's 60 Minutes II news show on April 28 have been reproduced as stills and transmitted all over the internet, showing up, as well, on Arab satellite television and in the Arabic press. The footage shows US military personnel forcing nude Iraqi prisoners to simulate sex acts. In others, they are made to form a human pyramid. One photo now circulating shows a man badly beaten. Another shows a corpse. Sexual humiliation may be the least of the indignities inflicted on some of the prisoners.

Several of the scenes show an American woman in uniform, gesturing lewdly and prancing before the hooded, nude Iraqi prisoners. One wonders if she is playing out her insecurities as a woman in the U.S. Army, looked down on by some of her male colleagues, by lording it over Iraqi prisoners of war. Was she compensating by playing dominatrix to Muslim men she imagined to be the ultimate male chauvinists? Although the main purpose of the abuse was to soften up the prisoners for interrogation, the precise forms of humiliation appear to have been shaped by the insecurities and prejudices of the reservists, who had been given no training in the Geneva Conventions.

The reaction to the photographs in the Arab world was, predictably, fury and humiliation. Samia Nakhoul of Reuters reported that Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the pan-Arabist London newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, said, "The liberators are worse than the dictators. This is the straw that broke the camel's back for America . . . That really, really is the worst atrocity. It affects the honour and pride of Muslim people. It is better to kill them than sexually abuse them." She also reported the sentiments of Daud al-Shiryan of Saudi Arabia: "This will increase the hatred of America, not just in Iraq but abroad. Even those who sympathised with the Americans before will stop. It is not just a picture of torture, it is degrading. It touches on morals and religion . . . Abu Ghraib prison was used for torture in Saddam's time. People will ask now what's the difference between Saddam and Bush. Nothing!"

Recently, the administration has fared no better in the image wars at home. The decision of the Sinclair Broadcast Group not to carry the April 30 broadcast of the late-night television news show from ABC, Nightline, anchored by Ted Koppel, because it was devoted to reading out the names and showing photographs of fallen U.S. military personnel, typifies the politicization of images. Koppel's show inevitably humanized the U.S. casualties in Iraq, putting faces and names with the shadowy statistics reported in most U.S. newspapers and television news shows daily.

Sinclair, headed by rightwing media mogul David Smith, issued a statement that the Nightline program "The Fallen," "appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq." Democratic members of Congress immediately called for a Federal Communications Commission investigation as to whether Smith was censoring the public airwaves for the sake of his own private political convictions. Senator John McCain, a former POW in North Vietnam, then weighed in with a letter to Smith: "Your decision to deny your viewers an opportunity to be reminded of war's terrible costs, in all their heartbreaking detail, is a gross disservice to the public, and to the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. It is, in short, sir, unpatriotic. I hope it meets with the public opprobrium it most certainly deserves."