[IP] 'Cam-phones in Iraq' story may be fake
...... Forwarded Message .......
From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 13:43:30 -0700 (PDT)
Subj: Re: [IP] IP: 'Cam-phones in Iraq' story may be fake
Susan Sontag put the whole thing rather well in last Sunday's NYT
Magazine. (I've excerpted three great paragraphs from her story below)
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html
Regarding the Torture of Others
Susan Sontag
A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once
photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the
soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war,
their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their
atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them
around the globe.
There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves.
At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real
events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be
edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people
record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am --
waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making
breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects
of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files
around. [...]
Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And
shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world
that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in
open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now
pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the
pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you
would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be
invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these
photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning
admiration for unapologetic brutality.
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Joseph Lorenzo Hall, SIMS PhD Student; UC Berkeley.
[web:<http://pobox.com/~joehall/>, blog:<http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb>]
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