The Abu Ghraib Photos We Can't Bear to See

The Daily Telegraph reports unreleased Abu Ghraib photographs include sexual torture and "rape." Does that have any bearing on the debate over whether we should be allowed to see the photographs? According to the story, the pictures include an American soldier raping a female prisoner and a "male translator raping a male detainee." Other photos include prisoners being sexually violated with a "truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube." Yet another is of a female prisoner being forcibly stripped to expose her breasts. Meanwhile, Obama has reversed his earlier stance and refused to release the photos, a position that has generated outcry and support.

According to a recent New York Times op-ed by Philip Gourevitch, who co-wrote The Ballad of Abu Ghraib with Standard Operating Procedure director Errol Morris, "Releasing additional photographs would not be telling us anything that we don’t already know." (Vanessa weighs in with her take on the op-ed here.) The Telegraph report seems to suggest otherwise—as this set of photos takes what we have seen to a whole new level. "Crime-scene photographs," Gourevitch writes, "for all their power to reveal, can also serve as a distraction, even a deterrent, from precise understanding of the events they depict." Ultimately, his point is that it's the story behind the story depicted in the photographs that matters. It's the men who led our country to this state that we must keep in our sights if we are to avoid repeating the war crimes of our recent past.

While Gourevitch is generally correct, in this specific case he is wholly wrong. What makes this new photographic revelation tricky, and is what, I suspect, led to Obama's some say "stunning" reversal, is that these photographs, for all intents and purposes, are pornographic. They are hardcore, unblinking, unphotoshopped depictions of Americans raping and sexually violating the "enemy" in the context of war. Because they are sexually graphic, it's their reception that is the potentially problematic part. Rightly or wrongly, in all likelihood, these photographs will titillate. All the P.C. politics of the mind cannot override the un-P.C. desires of the libido. But it is in spite of this fact that these photographs must be released. These days, we speak of "the pornography of war." This is that writ real. And we must bear witness to it in order to comprehend it, in all its horrifying reality. After all, we paid for it.

Tags: abu ghraib, Barack Obama, torture, torture photos

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Susannah Breslin Freelance journalist, blogger, photographer.

Comments

good article

By: khemso | Sat, 08/29/2009 - 02:54

Thanks for your article .... keep posting please

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Thats awful! I don't think

By: emmaphillips29 | Thu, 08/27/2009 - 12:55

Thats awful! I don't think the public should get to see the images.

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Hopefully I wont see it at

By: Marlet | Mon, 08/17/2009 - 05:20

Hopefully I wont see it at all
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You must be joking.

By: Grace | Thu, 05/28/2009 - 15:24

It is breathtakingly, astonishingly idiotic to boil down a complex issue regarding photographed sexual abuse by American troops of male and female members of the society they're "liberating" (by Crusade, if the Rumsfeld memos mean anything), and to come away with: the libs can't handle the tingly feelings naughty pictures give them.

The photos I've seen are horrific. They make me want to vomit, they're so horrible and degrading and insane. At no point did I also think "eh, sexy though", and I doubt very few others did either.

For heaven's sake, some people get turned on by exhibitionism. Others by people covered in latex, and still others by FEET. Of course there'll be a few people out there who get a thrill out of images of degradation and abuse. But I can't imagine that would or should be an element in the discussion the country has about the images.

They'll come out eventually, of course. For now, as much as I hate to say it, I'm coming round to the idea that they should not be published: that they should be described, sure, but not reproduced in a manner that would be so viscerally important as a recruiting tool. And much like all other evidence of horrific abuse, they should be accessible to the courts that should be trying both the perpetrators and their upper-level enablers/directors. But publicly shopping round images that involve a victim AND would be a fabulous recruiting tool for jihadists? Well, I'm saying I see the case for keeping them under wraps.

Your argument about titillation, unfortunately, says a whole lot more about you than it does about the actual merits of the release-or-not-release discussion. I can only imagine you're not one of the journalists who actually sat through a slide show of some of the more graphic images, or heard the taped screams of a terrified teenage boy inside Baghram.

...that is, I hope you weren't. Otherwise, I have no idea how you would write something like this.