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]