Publishing Pictures of Abuse

Richard Webster has an interesting post on the rights and wrongs of publishing images of prisoner abuse, taking issue with an article by Ian Mayes in the Guardian. Mayes is defending against reader complaints the prominent front page publication of a naked Iraqi prisoner being humiliated in Abu Ghraib:

Although readers did not always say so, it seemed to be the fact that the man's face was shown that increased the degree of distress communicated by the picture. "I realise that you have printed such pictures before on this terrible subject and I know that it is important for us to receive this information," one wrote. "Nevertheless, I object to [this picture] because I feel it is now bordering on voyeurism - it feels like incitement, somehow, or as if we all have a part of this man's shame and humiliation. I do not wish to be in any way associated with this sort of inhumanity, and by blazoning it on the front page of the paper it makes us all implicated."

There is, I suggest, some confusion here between the crime and evidence of the crime. Publication of the photograph does not infringe the man's human rights; but it does graphically convey an infringement of his rights. Taken with other photographs, and we now know there are at least 1,800, many showing greater abuses, the picture has an imperative that demands prominent publication - and demands it, apparently, regardless of all consequences (for instance the further excitement of anti-American feeling in the Arab world). The story has been rightly persistent.

Despite Mayes' patronising tone - "there is, I suggest, some confusion here..." - he misses entirely the point that the reader is trying to make: that publication broadcasts the man's humiliation to the world, and makes us all complicit. It serves to project an image to the Muslim world of a collective contempt for Arabs by the West.

Webster writes:

By far the most striking feature here is the phrase 'regardless of all consequences.' The appearance of these words, written by an experienced journalist and passed for publication by an editor, is nothing other than extraordinary. One sign that, by this point in his article, Mayes is not thinking clearly about the question he is attempting to address is the language which he uses. In reality the decision to publish this picture on the front page of the Guardian was made by journalists - almost certainly including the editor himself. It was a complex moral choice and, as the response of readers suggests, there were and are significant arguments both against using the picture without masking the victim's face, and against using it at all. Mayes, however, obscures this human and moral dilemma by an oddly impersonal turn of phrase. According to him, the picture compelled its own publication. ' . . . the picture,' he writes, 'has an imperative that demands prominent publication.'

Having made this practically meaningless claim, he goes on to deliver himself of the extraordinary pronouncement already referred to - that the picture should be published regardless of all consequences. He then pauses to mention one possible consequence: 'for instance the further excitement of anti-American feeling in the Arab world.' The choice of the word 'excitement' when normal usage would be 'incitement' is itself odd. One suspects that one of the reasons Mayes has shied away from the more natural choice of words is that 'incitement' is commonly used with 'hatred'. It is indeed anti-Western hatred that the picture in question is likely to incite, not simply 'anti-American feeling' as Mayes euphemistically writes. And hatred very frequently leads people to kill those who are its object.

This is one of the possible outcomes which Ian Mayes should be contemplating. If he believes that the picture should be published 'regardless of all consequences' he should be thinking more carefully and less euphemistically about just what those consequences might be. How many American and British soldiers is Mayes prepared to see killed before he begins to consider resisting the picture's alleged 'demand' to be published? How many Muslims must lose their lives in the reprisals that follow? How many hundreds of thousands of men, women and children must be killed before those who, like Ian Mayes, mindlessly recite the mantras of free speech, begin to realise that there are some possible consequences of publishing images of violence and degradation of which we should be mindful?

Mayes writes that 'publication of the photograph does not infringe the man's human rights; but it does graphically convey an infringement of his rights.' It is this view which leads him to proclaim that the picture has an 'imperative' which 'demands prominent publication'. Would he apply this argument to a victim of rape? Will the Guardian now be publishing pictures of women being sexually humiliated by men on the grounds that to do so 'graphically conveys an infringement of women's rights'? And how long will it then be, as the Guardian lurches deeper into the course of brutalisation which its readers' editor has now commended to us, before it starts fearlessly to publish pictures of children being sexually assaulted on the grounds that such images graphically convey an infringement of their rights?

That the pictures which have emerged from Abu Ghraib are a disgrace both to America and to its allies is beyond question. The existence of these pictures undoubtedly should have been made public, as it eventually was. The pictures themselves should have been seen by a number of people, and these should almost certainly have included responsible journalists. But the decision, taken originally by American newspaper editors, to publish images of Arab Muslims being mocked, bullied and humiliated so that the degradation inflicted on them could be seen by all the world, is a very different matter.

Partly because belief in free speech is as unreflective in Britain and America as belief in an omnipotent deity is among devout Muslims, little if any thought appears to have been given to this question.

No doubt we'll be seeing more and more of these pictures, their publication being greeted with smug satisfaction at the powers of a free press to expose the evils of Western power. We will not, however, see too many re-runs of, say, Nick Berg's decapitation, or other gruesome reminders of anti-Western brutality. Too upsetting for the relatives... It's this pursuit of a shamelessly partisan approach wrapped up in high moral language which I find so unpleasant.

Comments

[James Hamilton]

Mayes says, 'the story has rightly been persistent'; I assume that what he means here is that it has been deliberately kept going until those keeping it going achieve some goal they have in mind. The story itself is of course in the public domain already, and so is that concerning the fate of Nick Berg. If the prison abuse story is 'persistent', it has been persistent at the expense of two other stories that might themselves have been so, had Mayes' colleagues chosen, namely the beheading, and the release to the Iraq media of videos of Saddam's own prison 'abuse'. The choice of 'persistent story' has been made, we know by whom it has been made, and can draw our own conclusions.

[Eve Garrard]

Thanks for this fine commentary, Mick. Your final sentence is exactly right.

[Sophie]

Thank you for this post. It articulated very well what I felt but struggled to express.