Salon: Horror Show

[kskiska]

The government did not want us to see nightmarish images from Iraq. But with our soldiers and our enemies armed with digital cameras, we can't escape the gruesome realities of war.

Before Tuesday, none of us knew about the missing American in Iraq named Nick Berg. His family had been agonizing over his fate for weeks and had been hounding the U.S. government for any information it had about the 26-year-old freelance contractor who'd gone to Iraq just to do his patriotic duty, but Berg's story failed to captivate us the way other disappearances in Iraq have pulled us in. In retrospect it's obvious why we didn't pay attention: There were no pictures of Nick Berg's capture, as there were of the former hostage Thomas Hamill or the Japanese civilians caught by militants. Nick Berg disappeared without any of us noticing, and he remained anonymous until Tuesday morning, when, on a Web site affiliated with al-Qaida, the unspeakably gruesome video of his decapitation became available to us all.

Now, just about everyone in the world knows Nick Berg. You know what he wore in his last moments, you know what he said, you know his scream, the terror in his eyes, and, worst of all, you even know what he looked like after they killed him and held up his head as a prize. And because when you dare to watch his murder you sense how frightened he is, and you admire how calm he is, you feel as if you know Nick Berg intimately, that you've perhaps known him your whole life. And it's obvious, once again, why that is -- because there's a video of Nick Berg's last moments available to anyone with a computer, because you can see what happened.

The video of Berg's beheading that so dominated the news on Tuesday is just the latest example of how gruesome digital images are forcing us, and forcing the government, to confront the awful reality of war. There was a time, early in the invasion, when it seemed as if the American government might exercise near-perfect control over what we saw of the battlefield, and that no horrific pictures from the war would ever leak out. But in the last few weeks, with the publication of leaked pictures of returning caskets, tortured Iraqis, and now Nick Berg's slaughter, all of the controls the government had hoped to place on images from war seem to have completely failed. Digital technology -- the cameras and laptops carried by the soldiers and the contractors in Iraq, and the ability of our enemies to access the same communications technology -- has brought us a newer, far less palatable picture of what's going on in Iraq.

"I remember during the '80s Ronald Reagan said that the fax machine would pierce the Iron Curtain," says Peter Howe, a photojournalist and the former picture editor of the New York Times Magazine and Life magazine. "What we have today is an extension of that and a proliferation beyond anything we imagined -- now, we are piercing any form of governmental control whatsoever." With virtually everyone in Iraq armed with the capability to both photographically document and broadcast anything that occurs in the country, the Bush administration can forget about controlling the pictures that come to us from the battlefield. This can't be good news for the White House and the Pentagon, because the lesson of Vietnam, say photojournalists and historians, is that more than anything else, it's images that turn the public against a war.

more…
http://salon.com/tech/feature/2004/05/12/beheading_video/index.html

[opihimoimoi]

1. yup, the realities of life as we know it in living color will bring us

to the mirror only to see a species who baffled in who to follow.

We love to be led but we seem to follow the false promise much too often and allow ourselves to be fooled.