Unblinking Observer: Photos Show a War Beyond Investigations

[MountainLaurel]

The Iraq war is the first major conflict fought in what might be called the age of the new Panopticon. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham coined the term in the late 18th century to describe a prison in which the guard tower was in the center of concentric rings of cells, allowing authorities to exercise an "invisible omniscience." Although the word emerged in the context of prison reform, it has become more suggestive over the years, capturing something essential about power and authority, from Big Brother's pervasive surveillance to the more benign notion that government is always "looking into" things. But the new Panopticon is a digital phenomenon, a world of instant cameras, cellphone snapshots, e-mailed photographs, a world that produces a nonstop, immediate and ubiquitous visual record of itself -- and it is breaking the government's monopoly on omniscience.

Again and again throughout this war, amateur photographs have exposed the flaws of the military's carefully constructed image of discipline. Photographs made Abu Ghraib a symbol of shame throughout the world. And photographs and video images are again undermining the military's cherished reputation for calm under fire and heroic self-restraint.

The most horrifying images are not published or shown on TV, though they're easy to find on the Web. But the ones we are confronted with are bad enough: A small child, a victim of a devastating and controversial U.S. airstrike in Ishaqi, is dressed in baby-blue, his eyes are closed, and his tiny, gently clenched hand rests by his side. He might be asleep, except that the photograph, which ran in Newsweek, shows a mangled, bloody arm next to him. The unidentified, shredded limb (does it belong to yet another child?) reaching into the center of the image might well stand for all the rest of these photographs that prick the conscience: They seem to come from the margins of our attention, they reach in and put their bloody imprint on a war that we wish had more innocence and calm to it.

The military has concluded that there was no U.S. wrongdoing in the March 15 Ishaqi attack that left the child dead.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/05/AR2006060501437.html