iraq: [Uday and Qusay Hussein Post-mortem Pictures]

uday_qusaysmsmall Uday and Qusay were the sons of Saddam Hussein, numbers 2 and 3 on the U.S. Central Command’s most wanted list. They were killed on July 22, 2003 in Mosul during a raid by U.S. troops. Photographs of their battered and bloodied heads and upper torsos were released on CD-ROM to Iraqis by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Release of the photographs was intended to provide Iraqis with confirmation of their deaths and, in effect, proof of the end of the old regime. Given the US military's long-standing tradition of not publishing pictures of those killed in military operations, a controversy ensued. [Section by Ellen Acree]
[Larger view of image on the right]

CNN: "US. Officials Say Saddam's Sons Are Dead, But Questions Remain": July 23, 2003
““If we have to do some things that people say – you know, ‘you’re just scraping over the past, you’re giving us all this shocking stuff, why should our children have to see it on television?’ Let me tell you that the main consideration on the other side in our minds is saving the lives of American men and women who are on the line,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz at a Pentagon briefing Wednesday. [...] “Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. told CNN today, “Even if you show the picture, people are going to say, if they want to believe they’re still alive, they’ll say ‘hey you faked the pictures.’ Just because you show pictures of dead people doesn’t mean they’re dead.”
[CNN]

Craig Hines: "Two More Snaps For Some History Books": July 25: 2003
“Two pictures down and one more important one to go in Iraq. That’s not triumphal or bloodthirsty, it’s just realistic. The momentary squeamishness of some U. S. authorities about releasing photographs of the corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons was only momentarily understandable. For various reasons, the gory images had to be made public, and they were in short enough order. If you didn’t want to look, you didn’t have to. That’s sort of the way it’s been throughout the photographic age. The picture of May Surratt and her fellow Lincoln assassination conspirators dangling, tightly bound and hooded, from gallows ropes July 7, 1865, wasn’t exactly breakfast fare, but it was history. War and revolution are especially rich sources for the shocking yet iconic photograph, not that the post-mortem pictures of Uday and Qusay Hussein will assume that status, except perhaps in some warped way for Baathist true-believers. In our day, many of the most memorable photographs speak of military mayhem [...] by comparison, the pictures of Uday and Qusay Hussein, although gruesome, are prosaic.”
[Houstin Chronicle]

Alexandra Fourché: "Parading the Dead"
“There have been a number of precedents in history where dead leaders were displayed in one form or another to convince people of their passing. [...] The big difference with the Iraqi situation, Mr. Garton Ash (historian) said, “is that in the case of the Ceausecus, the Romanians themselves published the pictures, whereas in Iraq’s case the decisions was made by the occupying authorities. [...] One Swiss commentator asked whether the picture of the bearded Qusay – vaguely reminiscent of the dead Cuban revolutionary Che Geuvara – might risk becoming a similar kind of icon for Arab youth. [...] Uday and Qusay’s deaths may now be turned into symbols of Iraqi resistance and reflect badly on US methods in Iraq. Displaying the bodies was also controversial on religious grounds, as Muslim tradition requires corpses to be buried as quickly as possible.”
[BBC Online]

Tehran News: “Uday-Qusay bodies underwent ‘facial reconstruction'": July 26, 2003
"The bodies of the two slain sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, underwent "facial reconstruction" before they were shown to international correspondents Friday, a U.S. military official said. uday-qusay_cadav-small "The two bodies have undergone facial reconstruction with mortician's putty to make them resemble as closely as possible the faces of the brothers when they were alive," a U.S. military official told a pool correspondent. This was standard practice and there was no intention to deceive, he said, speaking to around 15 journalists at Baghdad's international airport where the corpses were being kept, AFP reported. Qusay's beard had been shaved off but his moustache had been left, while Uday's beard was still intact, the pool correspondent said. He added that the corpses did not look like they had in the initial photographs taken of the two and released to the press on Thursday.”
[Reference]

David Blair and Toby Harnden: "US To Show "Gruesome" Pictures of Saddam's Sons": July 7, 2003
“Paul Wolfowitz, Mr. Rumsfeld’s deputy, said: “We are going to make sure the Iraqi people believe us at the end of the day.” [...] American sources said they needed to put out the pictures to help quell attacks against coalition forces. There was concern, however, that releasing the pictures would be seen as distasteful as home, triumphalist in the Middle East and could encourage the display of dead American in future conflicts.”
[Telegraph]

Mary Riddell: "Face to Face With Death": July 27, 2003
“…But first, there is the verbal post-mortem. Should the Pentagon have released pictures to reassure the doubting Thomases of Iraq, who, unless they can see Uzi holes in cadavers, will not believe? The risk is that the bodies of US soldiers, 11 of whom have been killed in the past week, may now be paraded as propaganda tools. [...] Quite a different dilemma confronted British editors. Some, mindful of gratuitous voyeurism, used the brothers' bloody pictures discreetly. Others flaunted them. The Times, quaintly, printed a health warning, advising readers that they might find the images displayed inside 'disturbing'.”
[Observer]

Robert Fisk: "The Power of Death": July 26, 2003
"Arabs have never been squeamish about death. They see too much of it. So on the streets of Baghdad Iraqis will pore over the all-too-soon-to-be-iconic photographs of Uday and Qusay. They will say, some of them, "Yes, that's them, the terrible brothers, the 'lion-cubs' of the monster of Baghdad." And others will ask--a good question this--why couldn't they see them yesterday, or indeed the day before? Others still will ponder the old Arab belief in the "moamarer", the plot, the conspiracy. Did the Americans linger to fake the pictures? Have they digitised the brothers' faces to make them appear dead while still they live? The bullet wound in Uday's head, for example, the one that knocked out the teeth and part of the nose. Now there's many an Iraqi who would like to have fired the fatal shot. But what if Uday did take his own life rather than surrender to the enemy? What if he went down fighting, saving the last bullet for himself--and some suggestions have been made the wounds indicate suicide. Now that is an idea which can appeal to the tribal nature of Iraqi society. Iraqis have spent their lives fighting foreigners. Wasn't Uday doing the same? And history, which has an unhappy way of reorganising the most staged of events, might just conspire to turn these photographs into those of martyrs. Which is what the Baath militiamen will do. Cruel the brothers may have been. But cowards? That will be the message. In other words, the publication of these photographs will prove either a stroke of genius or a historic mistake of catastrophic consequences.”
[Counterpunch]

Sydney Morning Herald: "West Still Shies Away From Violent Images of War": July 26, 2003
“…However, in the modern West the industrialisation of death is more often coupled with a curious reluctance - at least until long after the event - to display photographic evidence of what that industrialisation means. The famous photos of Pearl Harbour after the Japanese attack in World War ll show no American dead. The US Government banned publication of any photos of dead American servicemen until more than two years into the war. If the rotting detritus of war has been used only infrequently on the front pages and television screens in the US, many pictures of dead luminaries have been published as proof of death, from the Wild West bandit Jesse James, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara to the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu. Some experts argued the release of the bloodied, lifeless images of Saddam's sons was justified and follows a garish tradition dating back centuries to Alexander the Great [...] "Seeing is the ultimate believing," said Paul Levinson professor or journalism at Fordham University in New York. "When Alexander the Great died at the young age of 33 they embalmed his body in honey [displayed in a glass coffin] and preserved it for as long as they could so people could come and see his body." But an editorial in the liberal German daily Frankfurter Rundschau criticised the release. "We're talking about human dignity," the paper said. "Independent of the crimes that Uday and Qusay were accused of, the display represents a violation of the basic principles of the civilised world." A spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch in New York said the pictures did not violate the Geneva Convention, which forbids using prisoners of war as objects of curiosity, because the men were dead. Bob Steele, a journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute, Florida, said there was a legitimate journalistic purpose in publishing the pictures. But their release sat uneasily with the Bush Administration's earlier objections to Arab television showing US prisoners of war in Iraq, he said. "There is an inconsistency, even a paradox, perhaps hypocrisy, when the Government strongly endorses the release of certain information and then strongly censors other information and restricts its release."
[Sydney Morning Herald]

CNN: "Release of Photos of Bodies Raises Ethical Concerns": July 24, 2003
“On the other side of the argument is that the United States has a long history of not making public pictures of those killed in military actions and that it could open the door for future enemies to make public photos of dead U.S. personnel [...] The U. S. – led provisional authority in Iraq decided to release their death photos to convince Iraqi doubters [...] The release of the pictures showing the damaged heads and shoulders of the brothers represents a departure from U. S. practice. [...] “From a value standpoint, image standpoint as a country, this is not something we do,” said CNN military analyst retired Air Force Maj. Don Shepperd. “The fact they [the U. S. – led administration] decided to do this is a significant decision. Of course, there is an overriding reason to do it now. There has to be an overriding reason to do something of this sort and depart from things we’ve done for decades.” Shepperd said the U. S. government stressed that the U. S. military was not releasing the photos – the coalition provisional authority was making them public. “What we don’t want to do is [...] set up a situation where every time we have a military operation, we end up with pictures of dead Americans, or us releasing photos of people from a military standpoint,” he said…“Paul Bremer, civilian administrator in Iraq, said: “I think it will help convince people that these two people are dead (and) we’re making the point that the Baathists are finished [...] Before the photos were released, former CIA Director James Woolsey said in an interview with CNN that the step was a necessary one. “Normally we would not do this,” he said. “But I think it’s necessary for the world to see and particularly for the Iraqis to see that these two are, in fact, dead, that this is not some ginned-up story from the United States. We’ve got to put up with a lot of lying about what has happened and what we’re doing,” Woolsey said. “And I think, under those circumstances, the pictures are going to be necessary.”
[CNN]

CNN: "Iraqis React To Release of Death Photos": July 24, 2003
“Many Iraqis said they believed that photographs released Thursday by the U. S. – led administration in Iraq showed the actual bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay.” Another man – a taxi driver who said his brothers were executed in 1982 in front of his mother because they regularly attended a mosque – said he feels at rest because one of the photos showed a victim with eyes closed. That indicated that he died after suffering, the driver said. “One woman said she was sure Qusay was dead, but had doubts about Uday’s photograph. She said she was happy when she heard both were killed, but wanted to make sure it was true.”
[CNN]

Tom Shales: "On Television, A Sharp Divide On Grisly Pictures": July 25, 2003
“Two days of obsessive intra-media debate ended yesterday morning when CNN and Fox News Channel, the two major American cable news networks, televised government-issued photographs apparently showing the bullet-riddled bodies of Saddam Hussein's infamous sons Uday and Qusay. Both networks showed picture after picture as they came down the wire and kept them flashing on the screen for a half-hour, warning viewers that the photos of bloody faces were "graphic" and potentially alarming. [...] Dan Rather...said that the photos would be shown on his newscast but that the decision was not a snap one. "We've had three discussions today about this," he said in the afternoon. "We will put some of the pictures on, not all. I don't feel good about it, but I don't see how we could meet our journalistic responsibility and meet the competitive aspects of what we do and not put them on. There's no way I'm going to be comfortable about it, but you have to weigh the factors.”
[Washington Post]

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