iraq

Muhammad Fhad Al-Harithy: "War Sans Blood: TV Initiates Change": August 22, 2004

"A new and different world is being shaped in the Middle East. TV has set in motion the process of changing people. It played a considerable role in the conduct of the Iraq war. [...] War scenes with their obvious pain and suggestions are registered deep in both hearts and in the subconscious. The very latest reports and pictures from war now reach the public live and uncensored. [...] The style of reporting has greatly changed since the Gulf War II of 1991 in which press conferences held by a military spokesperson were the major news sources. [...] An important lesson the US learned from past experiences, particularly in Vietnam, was the strategic significance of meticulous planning in advance of all media operations. [...] Media plans for the recent Iraq war were made as early as December 2002 with the help of senior officials at the White House and the departments of Defense and State. The strategy emphasized the message to be delivered, the press meetings every two hours and the spokesperson to make the presentation. The timing of the press meetings was planned so that they coincided with the morning TV news bulletins. The planners were also very careful in choosing the words to be used in the statements to the press. The US and its allies were referred to as Allied forces, a name which conjured up visions of the Allied Forces in World War II, which defeated the Nazis. Most of the media used the term. The media planners also presented American soldiers as kindhearted and sympathetic to the people of Iraq, undertaking humanitarian activities such as distributing relief materials to women and children and carrying the wounded and sick to hospitals. [...]

The difference between the Western and the Arab media was mainly cultural rather than technical. The conduct of the Arab media, however, resulted in the mindset of an entire nation being distorted. [...] TV news reports reduced events to pictures, which played a lead role in determining the impact of an event. Pictures play a significant role in interpreting events and influencing the minds of viewers. [...] Rapidly developing technology has provided the common man with fast and cheap access to information. State censors are helpless against what is now a flood of information. The difference between the old and new media is not so much in the new machines for news distribution as in enabling people to get news whenever they want it. [...] The choice is with the viewers; they can view any channel whenever they want. Round-the-clock war coverage created a negative impression in people’s minds. Wherever they turned, it was pictures of war that they had to see and think about. Instead of helping them have a clear understanding about the real war, the pictures were taken out of context and made the viewers lose sight of the reality. The end result was that viewers learned nothing new about the battles being fought. [...]

I wonder why no bloodshed, no dead body and no injured soldiers are seen in wars launched by superpowers. Only charred and destroyed military installations, empty of human victims, are seen. I wonder why no bloodshed, no dead body and no injured soldiers are seen in wars launched by superpowers. Only charred and destroyed military installations, empty of human victims, are seen. [...] An American study carried out in collaboration with Columbia University analyzed the results of the experience of journalists being embedded with military units. Most reports produced by the journalists lacked photos of actual war. It was, according to the study, a war without blood. [...] Withholding pictures with painful content is an issue being debated. Efforts to keep war reports free of blood and killing while thousands are in fact killed is tantamount to encouraging war because it makes people believe that war has no cost in terms of human lives."
[Arab News: The Middle East's Leading English Language Daily]

Garret Keizer: "A Picture Worth Exactly One Thousand Words": August 3, 2004

Playing off the old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words, writer Garret Keizer pens [and speaks] a thousand words on the body-pile at Abu Ghraib:

"Nothing in this picture is more telling than the upraised thumb of the standing soldier. Everything else in the picture is subsumed in that thumb. Much else is subsumed there also: the gusto of the beer commercial, the gung-ho posture of the action film, the vulgarity of a hundred in-your-face bumper-stickers, the jingoistic rhetoric of a thousand September 11th commemorations—the whole rah-rah, “go for it” attitude of the self-styled American ace. We are told that a thumbs-up meant mercy for the fallen in Roman gladiatorial contests. Other authorities say it meant death. In America it means that mercy and death are up to us. Because either you’re with us or against us. Because we’re number one."
[Mother Jones]

Abagail Solomon-Godeau: "Remote Control": August, 2004

Solomon-Godeau offers a valuable overview that resists synopsis:

"Like a miniature guillotine, a camera shutter slices an image from the world into which it may or may not be subsequently launched. But if it is launched—printed, transmitted, broadcast, or reproduced—it may function as an event in its own right. [...] the media tends to represent enemy casualties far more frequently than our own. In any case, discretion is the rule in news journalism, even in the tabloids. This is because the serving up of the (visually) horrific—blood, gore, mutilation, and so forth—is the task of the entertainment industry, not the news media. In reality, however, taboos about the body or about the dead both belong to that segregated domain designated as obscene—etymologically defined as what is, or should be, off-scene. [...] the image is by definition always considered more volatile, dangerous, and uncontrollable than written or verbal descriptions, even detailed ones, and so it has always been. In most of these recent cases of visual transgression someone or something—an event or a sight—was released and disseminated, and then quickly withdrawn from view."
[Artforum]

Seymour Hersh Claims Pantagon Has Tape of Children Being Sodomized at Abu Ghraib: July 7, 2004

"Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 'The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,' the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was 'a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher.' [...] He called the prison scene 'a series of massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and the vice president, by this administration anyway…war crimes.' The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. 'They see us as a sexually perverse society.'"
[From Ed Cone's "Word Up"]

Transcript of a section of Hersh's speech to the ACLU:
"Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...] The women were passing messages saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened.' Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out. It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?"
[Daily Kos]
[Video of Hersh's talk—RealPlayer]

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber: "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq": 2004

"In their eye-opening new exposé, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, Rampton and Stauber take no prisoners as they reveal - headline by headline, news show by news show, press conference by press conference - the deliberate, aggressive, and highly successful public relations campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the American public. [...] Rampton and Stauber show us a brave new shocking world where savvy marketers, “information warriors,” and “perception managers” can sell an entire war to consumers. Indeed, Washington successfully brought together the world’s top ad agencies and media empires to create “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” - a product no decent, patriotic citizen could possibly object to. With meticulous research and documentation, Rampton and Stauber deconstruct this and other “true lies” behind the war..."
[More on the book]

Faisal Bodi: "Decapitation: Execrable, But Effective" [Al Jazeera]: July 3, 2004

"Until the shooting death in June of US soldier Keith Maupin, the insurgents had made a point of beheading their captives and disseminating the grisly scenes over the internet. Most people would recoil at the mere thought, but experts say that is precisely the aim. In war, ascendancy in the horror stakes can be a major battlefield gain. 'It gives people an enormous feeling of their own power that they can threaten this fate to their opponents,' believes Professor Ian Robins, a London-based traumatic stress psychologist who specialises in treating war prisoners. While it serves as a morale booster for the perpetrators, it has the converse effect on their opponents. [...] The captive himself becomes a weapon for his captors, a tool for the transmission of horror to the rest of the enemy, effective in proportion to the level of his fear. [...] The act also gives insurgents another advantage. In an age where wars are fought as much on TV as on the battlefield, they no longer need actual victories. The battle, says Meyerson, can be 'won with a single dramatic visual impact'. [...] By turning his family into celebrity anti-war campaigners the beheading of Berg became a political gain for his killers. 'The acts are a sure way of making governments look incompetent by showing they are powerless to stop them despite the fact that they might pour billions of dollars into the campaign,' said Professor Robins. Nothing succeeds like success and so long as the acts continue to put pressure on enemy governments there is little incentive for the perpetrators to stop, according to Robins. 'Behaviour is maintained or increased by its consequences. This [beheadings] gets an enormous amount of attention and scrutiny and therefore it is highly likely it will continue.'"
[Al Jazeera]

"Gunner Palace": New Documentary Film About Iraq: June 1, 2004

Independent filmmaker Michael Tucker traveled to Iraq four times in 2003-2004 to make his new film, "Gunner Palace." His website provides in-depth background on his experience there, along with a trailer for the film—7MG Quicktime. GreenCine has an interview with Tucker by David Hudson, recorded on June 21, 2004. As of June 4, 2004 there is no information about its release. Sign up with Tucker for email notice about eventual DVD publication.

[Gunner Palace Website]
[Guardian: "Counting the Days in Gunner Palace"]

Jim Maceda: "Terrorists and the Internet": June 24, 2004

"When militants used to want to make a point, they would send faxes or videotapes to international news agencies. But now, al Qaida is putting its graphic messages and images straight up on the web—with maximum effect. Technology has become their latest weapon in their Holy War [...] According to Paul Eedle, media expert, “Al Qaida is as much media machine as military organization. These messages are what they want the world to see.” [...] militants are cleverly staying one step ahead of the law, even able to hijack websites, like one belonging to a Silicon Valley survey and mapping company to briefly upload its images of the captured Johnson. [...] But some analysts say al Qaida’s use of digital technology to spread their bloody message can backfire. Intelligence sources think that al Qaida’s former top operative in Saudi Arabia—Abdel Azziz al-Muqrin was found and killed last week, because of leads picked up by police experts on websites al-Muqrin used to show Johnson’s execution."
[MSNBC]

Pedro Meyer: "Icons Of This War...": May 23, 2004

"I don't think it's too far fetched to assume that the main icons of this second US war in Iraq in 2004, still in process, will be the amateur digital pictures of the tortures performed on Iraqui detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. [...] digital cameras became for the Bush administration what the tape recorder was for the Nixon White House [...] If the most emblematic images from this war were photographed by amateurs, if agencies are able to send out people to take photographs who have never taken pictures, but have access to certain places, and if we are into a tidal wave of imagery coming in from all the digital cameras that are flooding the world; I am sure that traditional photojournalism as is being taught today in schools all over the world, better have a second look at reality and be prepared to tell their students that things are no longer how they used to be and therefore need to adjust their expectations."
[Zone|Zero Editorial]

David Simpson: "The Mourning Paper": May 7, 2004 [Comprehensive overview article]

"It is not news that all images are subject to both direct and self-imposed political and ideological control. Private Jessica Lynch, who had the independence of mind to resent the falsifications of her captivity narrative for propaganda purposes and the courage to say so, has also quietly disappeared from major-media sight. But the recent discussion is almost entirely limited to the rights and wrongs of exposing our dead to various kinds of public attention. [...] Before the Abu Ghraib prison photos it had been almost impossible to find in the US images of dead or suffering Iraqi civilians of the sort that the rest of the world had been seeing: equivalents of the famous Vietnam photo of a girl running screaming from a napalm attack that is thought to have done so much to affect the hearts and minds of Americans during that war. [...] Derrida and others have written perceptively of the degree to which 'they' are already 'us' - trained by us, often previously supported by us - so that the attack of the other is also significantly an attack by the 'self', an aggression that can be seen as coming from 'them' only by a political rhetoric committed to improbable absolutes. [...] war cannot easily survive the capacity to imagine oneself in the body of the other as well as in the bodies of our dead and dying. [...] The most troubling implication of this story is that it appears to be untypical. Few of us in the homeland are given any materials for imagining ourselves in the place and body of the other, a place where in so many ways we already are: this is the real symmetry between 9/11 then and Iraq today. [...] If this is indeed the society of the spectacle then mere exposure to more and more images will not of itself guarantee any meaningful sympathy with and for others. The photodocumentary task is not an end in itself, but it is a beginning. We will never know whether we are already numb, or need to numb ourselves, before images of death and duress unless we see them."
[London Review of Books]

Geoff Pevere: "Pictures, More Than Ever, Tell Iraq Story": June 4, 2004

"The power of these images lies in their unofficial status. They capture candid and uncontrolled moments from a regime that has otherwise exerted a certain fanaticism in the area of message management. [...] Working with a largely compliant mainstream media, the administration had, for the first several months of the war, successfully prevented images of dead American soldiers — or their families — from making it to TV. War journalists are "embedded" by the U.S. military or they don't cover the war. [...] The story there was in the pictures: pictures taken by American military personnel of their comrades in arms in the act of torturing Iraqi prisoners, recorded with digital cameras that everybody now uses, and e-mailed anywhere instantly. Massive chinks were now apparent in the Bush administration's once impenetrable public relations armour, and they were being caused by people taking pictures. [...] The camera is always running."
[Toronto Star]

Dennis Dunleavy: "The Making of an Iconic Image: Hostage Taking in the Middle East": June 21, 2004

"Iconic images are pictures that become embedded in our social, political and historic memory. In the visual stock agency that is the human brain, images are stored away for future reference through our experiences with them. This is why I can make a visual connection between the recent prisoner abuse and beheading images and pictures of African Americans between beaten or lynched throughout our history. More and more, the images showing hostages kneeling before a group of masked gunmen has come to signify a turn in public perceptions surrounding the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Pictures can be like a barometer signaling a society's political and cultural pressure points. The power of an iconic image extends beyond the meaning of its original occurrence to form an ideological benchmark in history. When we view the images of hostages threatened with beheading by militants a visual foreshadowing occurs and our minds paints a grisly conclusion for us."

Mark Jurkowitz: "A War of Images"

"Ellen Bloch: "We're in the shock stage. You have to have some kind of mental framework to put this in. And so far we don't...The difference between the Vietnam War and now is that everything is in real time where we can get repeated images throughout the day." [...] Matthew Baum: "You had a long period when the war was like the first Gulf War, like a video game war...Sooner or later, the ugly images break through a little bit and the war gets real." [...] Frank Newport: "...in an era when there is less trust of the media than there has been in the past, where print and audio can leave people unmoved, a photo has tremendous impact, because it's evidence. To see something does carry a significant impact." The perceived ability of powerful news images to influence public opinion and then to generate pressure on the government for a change in policy has been dubbed "the CNN Effect." Its potency is a subject of heated debate."
[Boston Globe]

Robert Wright: "Creating a New Picture of War, Pixel by Pixel": May 18, 2004

"America may not have brought democracy to Iraq yet, but it has democratized Iraq's technology. Starting a website is now legal, and so is entering an online chat room. Nongovernmental Internet cafes have sprung up, and cellphones are spreading. [...] The revolution it is part of — grass-roots digital empowerment — will change the nature of war and the place of war in American foreign policy. [...] Even before the Abu Ghraib uproar, digital images were fueling anti-Americanism and complicating the occupation — and the images weren't coming from American cameras. With camcorders increasingly common, Iraqis watching Al Jazeera have seen much more Iraqi suffering than American TV viewers realize. Meanwhile, Iraqi insurgents have already put gruesome images from the war into recruiting videos, distributed on DVDs. And Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are sure to splice the Abu Ghraib photos into their own videos, viewable on the Web. [...] Even if we avoid future prisoner abuse scandals, wars will bring more bad publicity than they used to, as smaller, cheaper and ever-more-pervasive cameras and camcorders create images that are manna for grass-roots propagandists. (Imagine civilians whose neighborhoods are bombed uploading pictures of wounded, crying children directly to the Web.) And digital technologies more broadly will boost any postwar insurgencies. [...] This digitally driven transition from authoritarianism to pluralism, from closed societies to open societies, will be turbulent."
[LA Times]

Video-blogging Will Sharpen the Debate

"These events were recorded by participants or bystanders. The images were posted on the internet, making them directly, freely and immediately accessible around the world. In other words, journalists played no part in recording or interpreting the images. No editors intervened, government censors and spin doctors were impotent. According to Steve Vines, publisher of a Hong Kong weekly news and political satire magazine, Spike "the main barriers to publishing - cost and geography - have vanished and the result is explosive...unfiltered, uncensored images are now starting to drive the menu of the mainstream news oulets. After Web-logging became a news source for conventional media after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the next step, "Vblogging," will enable those with a desire and a little technology the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field," forbes.com, the website of Forbes magazine, says. So the challenge to traditional journalism as the determinant of what is news and how news should be filtered will only intensify. And the debate about whether undigested news is objective, useful and moral is bound to sharpen."
[Mail & Guardian - Via Smart Mobs]

Mark Bowden: "The Lessons of Abu Ghraib"

"The fact that the pictures were taken at all, and the cheerful expressions on the faces of the American bullies, suggest an atmosphere in which these soldiers had no reason to fear being punished for their behavior. It seems doubtful that the photos were meant to be used later to intimidate other prisoners, as has been suggested. If that had been so, the guards would probably have tried to look threatening. These photos have the appearance of grotesque souvenirs. The smiling faces of the tormentors suggest that apart from lacking moral judgment, these soldiers felt licensed to abuse."
[Atlantic]

Jonathan Nichols-Pethick: Reality TV & Desensitization: May 17, 2004

"Reality TV is part of a larger media environment that capitalizes on humiliation, tragic behavior, and the like. It encourages us to take pleasure in seeing people humiliated and put in dangerous situations. This helps desensitize audiences to the pictures they see from Iraq. This isn't necessarily a direct effect, but it is part of the environment."
[MSNBC, May 17, 2004]

Jonathan Curiel: "War Images and Digital Technology": May 16, 2004

"A widely held perception of the Vietnam War is that gruesome images from the conflict swayed public opinion [...] Todd Gitlin says this cause-and-effect scenario is a myth—a myth that has relevance to the stream of violent images coming out of Iraq. [...] "Even when public opinion finally turned on balance against the war, which was 1968, most of it was a pragmatic rejection of the war, not a moral one. It was not, 'My God, this war is so atrocious, I can't stand it anymore.' It was (more) a sense that the war was unwinnable and not being won and not worth the price." [...] "In Vietnam, the images served as confirmation for people rather than as a revelation," says photographer Peter Howe [...] "The images "confirmed what they had heard (as rumor or from another source). In Iraq, we're getting everything in the same package. The images we're seeing are (revelations) and are the instruments of change. They both confirm and change at the same time." [...] "Digital technology, in the form of digital cameras, and being able to use the Internet as a platform for their distribution, has completely altered everything. Now, ordinary people—people with very little photographic skills or training—can actually take publishable, quality photographs and distribute them over a wide area with no controls whatsoever." [...] Today, everything is instantaneous—both the photos and the reaction to them."
[San Francisco Gate]

Glenn Garvin and Daniel de Vise: "Harrowing Images Scar Nation's Psyche": May 16, 2004

"If Vietnam was the first television war, America's conflict with radical Islam may be the first RealPlayer war. [...] The online search-engine company Lycos reported that in the first 24 hours after it was released Tuesday, the Berg video was the most sought-after thing on the Internet [...] If the prison photos and the Berg video are similar in that they both show scenes of shocking cruelty, they are also very different -- and not just in the degree of inhumanity they depict. The U.S. soldiers who took snapshots of their ritual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners never imagined they would wind up on television. The al Qaeda killers, by contrast, hungered for it. [...] ''When I was young, there was a civil war in Nigeria, and there was a famous video of an army platoon executing a Nigerian warrior,'' recalls Jim Upshaw, a former NBC reporter who teaches journalism at the University of Oregon. "It was very disturbing, and for me, it was an icon of inhumanity. But then it was trumped by Vietnam, especially the pictures of the little girl running from the napalm. They burn on as icons for me, as do the Zippo lighters and hooches. But now so many of these things are available at our fingertips that they don't count as much as they once did. Now, I wonder if they live on only until the next worst picture of your life shows up.''"
[The Miami Herald]

Garry Baker: "A War of Pictures": May 16, 2004

"Photographs of war have been changing public opinion for a long time. But the internet has now made a picture worth millions of words. [...] Graphic television coverage of human conflict has been commonplace since the Vietnam War, but the intervention of the internet has changed the rules. Anyone with a digital video camera and a computer can spread whatever message they choose to millions of people, few of them in a position to know the full truth. [...] "One could hope that this increase in the circulation of images of human tragedy might make us more compassionate, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case," says Richard Devetak. "It is not going to stop wars." Like many commentators, Devetak fears the Berg video will serve mainly to raise the rage in middle America and strengthen President George Bush's support and his resolve to continue, even escalate, the war in Iraq. "It is likely to heighten our sensitivity to the plight of our own soldiers on the ground and also make the war even nastier."
[The Age]

Dennis Dunleavy: "The Next Revolution Will Be Digital": May, 2004

"The immediacy of these images and their dissemination through the Internet circumvents the formidable "food chain" of communication channels imposed by government and carried out through conventional mainstream mass media. As the natural proclivities of soldiers snapping scrapbook trophies to show the grandchildren someday, these images add a grainy and unaesthetic reality to an often-sanitized portrayal of our foreign exploits. Fortunately, there are some individuals who still believe in democratic civics.

The digital camera represents an important tool in keeping those in power honest about their actions. In this case, citizen soldiers disgusted by the barbarity of others turned to the media to report what they believed to be unconscionable behavior. [...] The next revolution may not be televised by embedded journalists, but rather by an army of citizen soldiers carrying inexpensive digital "happy snap" cameras. [...] The next revolution will be digital and is being pinged across the email right now."
[Source: The Digital Journalist]

Amy Harmon: "New Technology Loosens Controls Over Images of War": May 14, 2004

"In an era when pictures and video can be captured and distributed across the world with a few clicks, the traditional establishment — the military, the government, the mainstream media — appears to be losing control of the images of war. Digital technology, Internet experts and military historians said, is forcing a major shift in the expectation of what can be kept private, and it may ultimately hold everyone more accountable for their actions. [...] The searing images of previous wars — like the photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from the flames of a napalm-bomb attack — were filtered by governments or news organizations, the only entities that could reach large audiences. But digital technology allows individuals an equivalent power. [...] Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, said technology had turned some of the dire predictions of total government surveillance on their head. "Little Brother has a cellphone camera and he is watching back," Mr. Saffo said. "Like it or not, the military has just turned extremely transparent." [...] The outpouring of war images may be less politically motivated than a natural outgrowth of the new documentary culture that has millions of people snapping photographs of their lives."
[New York Times]

Ellen Simon: "Digital Cameras Change Perception of War": May 7, 2004

"[Keith Jenkins:] “With the technology now, the amateur photographer is as capable as a professional journalist and is operating with the same tools: Digital camera, laptop and an Internet connection...The embedded process was supposed to give government a better handle on what journalists were doing, but now you have this whole rogue operation of civilians with digital cameras who have access to things the media don’t." [...] Because digital cameras have features like automatic focus, they have made it easy for anyone to take technically good photographs. Combine that with Internet connections that have made it easy to send pictures in seconds, and images of the war that previously might not have been seen have found an enormous international audience."
[MSNBC]