Photos Unseen

Why have the various accounts of torture, directly or indirectly, at the hands of American personnel been out of the news? Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay are locations where abuses have been alleged. Recent accounts of rendition to other countries, where torture can be applied with impunity, have also been reported.

All of these related stories with the potential to rock the political world are missing or receive secondary coverage at best. One would expect such stories to receive top coverage based on the severity of the implications. Go figure.

American society, after all, is an entertainment and gossip-based society. A society whose attention is grabbed by visual or emotional stimuli. Exactly the same stimuli the current media controllers do not want to unleash by releasing photos capturing the abuse at the hands of "America's boys".

Some observations made by Matt Welch, a columnist for Canada's National Post and associate editor for Reason Online, provide the background why the torture and abuse accusations are not makeing headlines. In his latest article, The Pentagon's Secret Stash: Why we'll never see the second round of Abu Ghraib photos, he lays it all out on the table.

The images, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress, depict "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman." After Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) viewed some of them in a classified briefing, he testified that his "stomach gave out." NBC News reported that they show "American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys." Everyone who saw the photographs and videos seemed to shudder openly when contemplating what the reaction would be when they eventually were made public.

But they never were... ABC News broadcast two new photos from the notorious Iraq prison on May 19, The Washington Post printed a half-dozen on May 20 and three more on June 10, and that was it.

"The Pentagon realizes that it's images that sell the story," [Steven] Aftergood [from the Federation of American Scientists] says. "The reason that there is a torture scandal is because of those photographs. There can be narratives of things that are much worse, but if they aren't accompanied by photos, they somehow don't register....The Abu Ghraib photos are sort of the military equivalent of the Rodney King case....And I hate to attribute motives to people I don't know, but it is easy to imagine that the officials who are withholding these images have that fact in mind."

We will not see these photos unless there is a major push made by influencial media personalities, which is highly unlikely as they will surely lose their jobs. Perhaps it will take grassroots activities and effort from the blogging community to bring more attention to the topic.

The reason these photos are not made public is simple: Torture photos undermine support for the Iraq war. Anything which draws attention to the illegality of the war, the hidden agenda and true reasons for the administration's decision to go to war, and the military abuses will receive little to no coverage, at best, or, worse, provocation for application of the Patriot Act by being labeled a terrorist for not supporting the war.

Technorati Categories: Human Rights, Politics, Prisoner Abuse, War