Seeing behind the images: Standard Operating Procedure

Lynndie England and Charles Graner. In... happier times?

I. What's Past is Prologue

"What are Arabs seeing, and what does that mean for us?" asked Duncan McInnis, the US State Department official in charge of fighting "the war over America's image in the Middle East," in a "Frontline/World" documentary, "News War: War of Ideas" (broadcast March 27, 2007).

"For instance in Iraq. Because Arabs are upset about the presence of armed forces in an Arab country, there are no good images of an American soldier. An American soldier building a hospital in Iraq is still an American soldier in Iraq. In that case, all images are bad. And we need to know that, we need to know that's what they see."

The image is the world's only remaining superpower. Understanding their power of images -- not just what's in the pictures themselves, but what they signify -- is the key to understanding the world and our place within it. It's also, recently, the source of the most deadly and dismal failures in American history. From the attacks of 9/11 through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Americans' inability to comprehend what they were seeing -- or even to recognize the primacy of the image itself as the representation of events -- has had catastrophic consequences.

German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was pilloried when he said, shortly after 9/11: "What happened there is—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever... Against that, we composers are nothing.” Whatever it was, precisely, that Stockhausen intended to convey (and he immediately regretted saying it in the fever of the time), his words should have shocked us into seeing what was before our eyes, something to which the hypnotic, endless-looop repetitions of the crashing planes and collapsing buildings on every TV screen, may have blinded us: These images were carefully planned, and executed -- composed not so much as "art," as Stockhausen framed it, but as visual propaganda on a spectacular and terrifying scale -- the epitome of "terrorism" as imagery, and vice-versa.

Symbolic imagery -- and all-too-real at the same time.

By focusing upon and recycling certain images (the explosions, the dust clouds coming at the cameras) and repressing or censoring others (the unbearable situation of those trapped in the buildings, the ones who jumped or fell and the ones who stayed, the flesh-and-blood carnage on the streets below), the media lodged indelible images in our brains that we thought we understood ("This is an act of war"), but couldn't quite wrap our heads around.

And what we didn't fully get was the nature of the spectacle. To the perpetrators the human toll was almost incidental -- collateral damage. Far deadlier attacks were possible, but this one had grandiose symbolic potency that, like the footage of the explosion of the Hindenburg, would implant terror in the mind of anyone who saw it. And in the case of 9/11 (before it was given that label), that was the point of creating the images in the first place. It wasn't about the casualties but the pictures.

By keeping the cameras at a distance and focusing on the spectacle, the media made it easy for the disaffected to cheer the abstract assault on American power that the smoking, collapsing towers represented. They didn't have to think too much, or feel too much, about the real-life victims. Of course, that's also exactly how the "embedded" American media would later treat military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Even the caskets of soldiers killed in combat became, officially, invisible for the first time in American history.

II. Standard Operating Procedure

"America has never been perceived as more isolated and less influential.... The reality is that America's position is undermined, and nobody needs to understand that more than Americans." -- David Marash, Washington Anchor, Al Jazeera English, in "News Wars: War of Ideas"

"Re-enactment" image of an Abu Ghraib interrogation from "Standard Operating Procedure."

Images have as much power as policy. Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure," an investigation of the photographs of American soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of images, and how the amateur photos with which we have become familiar (the ones that undermined American power and influence in the world more than anything since the decision to invade Iraq itself) came to be what they are. The digital shots are powerful propaganda tools, shocks to the conscience, but they are also common photographs -- taken at a particular time and place by individuals, almost instinctively or routinely and without thought, for reasons perhaps even they don't understand.