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Robert Fisk: Why torturers film their
handiwork
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In the years after his downfall, I lectured around the world on the illegality and the immorality and the outrageous civilian slaughter of the invasion of Iraq by George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara (now, of course, Lord Blair of Isfahan). But I also carried with me extracts from those obscene videos – just in case the war's detractors forgot just what an iniquitous man Saddam actually was.
To spare the sensitivities of audiences, I cut hours of video down to a raw and terrifying minute and a half in which prisoners in underpants were whipped with wire by uniformed guards, made to crawl in sewers and were eventually piled in a bloody heap of the semi-dead. Blood was the colour. The only sounds were of the guards' abuse and the screaming and pleading of the captives. The videos were originally shot to shame the prisoners, but also, I suspect, for the sense of domination it gave the torturers.
The Abu Ghraib pictures – US torturers taking over the role of the Iraqi thugs in the very same prison in which many of the earlier Saddam videos were shot – had perhaps the same purpose. Lynndie England saw nothing particularly wrong with them. That was what Iraq was like, wasn't it? And we must forget, of course, that other American pictures from Abu Ghraib, which Obama the Good has decided we must not see, show the rape of Iraqi women and boys.
Janina Struk's new book on soldiers' private pictures of war, which I wrote about last week, contains some paragraphs about the new military art of filming, editing and producing war by video, the soldiers' very own version of Hollywood, in which real soldiers play themselves in real life and real Iraqis are cut down and killed in front of the camera. If the Vietnam-era US army could take photos of its own atrocities, American soldiers in Iraq have gone a step further.
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