May 11, 2004
Bodas de Sangre
Posted by nerdling | May 11, 2004 09:36 AM
An op-ed piece in the NY Times caught my eye today. Written by the highly interesting and insightful Luc Sante—whom, if you have not read his work, is a writer and photography historian who has written about early crime scene photography and other horrors on film—this piece attempts to explain why the photos from Abu Ghraib are so troubling:
Of course the violence at Abu Ghraib was primarily psychological — hey, only a few people were killed — and the trophies were pictorial, like the results of a photo safari. Some commentators have made a point of noting this very relative nonviolence, contrasting it with the lynching of the four American military contractors in Falluja last month. This line of argument is notable for what it leaves out: there is a difference between the rage of a people who feel themselves invaded and the contempt of a victorious nation for a civilian population whom it has ostensibly liberated.
In a note on a personal pet peeve, I keep hearing senators and military personnel on the radio who cannot correctly pronounce Abu Ghraib. Granted, languages in the Middle East are not easy to manage with our softer American accents, but doesn't it seem to anyone else that failure to learn the proper way to say the name of the prison in question trivializes the horrible importance of these events?
To bring things up even further, more information continues to come to light regarding the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Not only were these people cruel, they were swapping the photos like they were dirty playing cards or magazine pinups.
Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion.
...
NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.” Not to mention terrorizing people with snarling German Shepards, sodomizing them with chemical lights, sexual humiliation and your plain, old-fashioned beatings.
The Complete Bushisms at Slate.com. Considering the above mess, it isn't funny so much as painful.
Monsanto backs off of genetically modified wheat in response to protests from farmers. Whoop!
CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research—and the birthplace of the world wide web—celebrates 50 years of operation this year.
In its first 50 years, Cern uncovered the quark layer of matter, discovered how nature's forces operate, and showed how matter was created in the first moments after the Big Bang.
