We were never supposed to see the pictures that are now pouring out of Iraq. If the government had had its way, as it did in the initial weeks and months of the fight, we would only have seen what a few handpicked journalists -- those famous embeds -- were allowed to show us. We would not have seen dead soldiers returning, or dead civilians on the battlefield, or our own civilians being held at the mercy of the shadowy enemy. And never under any circumstances would we be shown pictures of our side torturing the people we were claiming to have liberated.
What's ironic about the pictures we're seeing now is that journalists had nothing to do with them. While the government may still try to keep things away from reporters, "what they cannot control are the images that are produced by others, even from the people who work for them," Howe says. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison prove this point. While the government tried to control the media, its own soldiers were using new technology to "basically create homemade porn with their digital cameras," says Donald Winslow, a photojournalist and the editor of News Photographer magazine. "They assembled them into galleries and e-mailed them to people -- it's ludicrous when you think about it, but to a generation of soldiers that are maybe in their later teens or 20s, at some point this seemed like a good idea and they did it."
"Imagine if World War II were fought in this environment," says Winslow. "Imagine if we were sitting here in the midst of watching American troops in battle in Europe. And all of a sudden you watched a video of a couple thousand prisoners of war in Auschwitz being led into an extermination room. Or if you had a traffic cam in Dresden and you sat and watched the city being bombed. That's not that much different from the environment we have today." But Winslow doesn't know whether the Holocaust would have happened in an era of cellphone cameras; maybe the Germans wouldn't have shied away from their atrocities even despite the constant photography.
The lesson in all this?
The lesson from Abu Ghraib, or from Nick Berg, is that you never know what technology can reap. Digital cameras were never meant as a tool for documenting torture, and the Web was not invented as a way for fanatics to broadcast pictures of their murders. But here we are. "They've become tools of war," Winslow says.
