Bush admitted Wednesday to ignorance of any pictures until he saw them, "on TV"
"I don't know if Americans understand the scope of the damage over this story. It will set us back years and decades," said Robin Wright, award-winning reporter for the Washington Post who has covered the Middle East for nearly three decades.
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"What happened is calamitous for the immediate goals of the United States in Iraq as well as our broader agenda to achieve democratic reform throughout the Islamic world..."
Anthony Violanti/BUffalo News May.07.04
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To a lot of journalists "what happened..." is the pictures being shown in the media. It's that the pictures got out. Like when a criminal gets caught. It's not about the crime it's about getting caught. Let's not talk about the symptom this is, of a pervasive corruption that extends beyond the puppets and wind-up dolls in the White House. Let's not talk about media complicity in the architecture of power that puts John Negroponte, that diplomatic vampire, in the wings, waiting for his cue. Let's not talk about Israel and nuclear weapons and the taboos of American journalism that led to this one small glimpse of the inhuman presence the American military is in the world being such a profoundly shocking thing. This has been happening for years, everywhere the US military has operated, and everywhere its scum auxiliaries have operated. This and worse is happening in Indonesia, it happened in El Salvador, and Chile, just like that. And worse. Worse until the weight of it makes the innocence you need to even see it disappear. You can't keep looking at it and stay innocent enough to be moved by it.
"The story" here is what happened to make those pictures - the cameras, the guards, the prisoners, the prison. "The story" being centered on an ignorant young girl from Tennessee, and on some faceless, nameless, Iraqi prisoners.
Of course those Iraqi men, with the leashes around their necks, or piled like fraternity boys on top of each other, don't see themselves in this "story" the way people watching it "on TV" do.
They see their own lives irredeemably broken.
And we haven't seen any pictures of the women and the girls have we?
But the story isn't even there.
It's a narrative that hasn't closed yet, that hasn't resolved. In that sense, in the sense that it is a "story", it's still being told. And it's big, the way the most important stories are. It's a big story now.
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I wonder sometimes if it isn't intentional. The international publication of graphic images of a degraded enemy. The vicious bragging of an arrogant sociopathic people. Cunningly disguised as exposure. Publicity carried out by third parties, just like the invasion and the occupation.
