Photo Recall

Photo Recall

I remember the picture well.

A group of American GIs squatting on the ground. One of them smiles at the camera. One of his hands holds an M-16 automatic rifle. His other hand rests on the severed heads of two dead Vietnamese men. In the foreground of the photo lie their mutilated corpses.

I was fourteen when I saw this picture. I came across it in somewhere in the middle of an issue of The Black Panther newspaper that had been passed around during class in my junior high school.

By that time, I was already vehemently opposed to America’s twisted adventure in Southeast Asia. While the photo’s vivid depiction of decapitation elicited a certain feeling of revulsion, it didn’t mark some life-changing moment, or lead to a great epiphany about the war in Indochina or the nature of America. That came about through a longer process of reading, listening and debating while seeing the ugly truth unfold as each day passed.

Still, the photo accomplished something that even a cogent explanation or well-written article chock full of descriptive accounts could not do as well. In that instance it took the series of black and white pixels on print to pass through the eyes and into the brain, the Vietnam War was distilled down to it’s essence. Not a noble cause, nor good intentions gone awry. No mismanaged or bungled intervention. Just murder. Simple and plain. Murder.

To look at this photo allowed little room to entertain nostalgic fictions of American innocence or indulge in well-crafted hollow phrases of national purpose. It was what it was. Not easily forgotten or dismissed. It’s message delivered without uttering a single word.

This was not a crime photo or undercover expose. This was a souvenir. A trophy. The armed protagonists secure enough to comfortably pose for the camera, reminiscent of other photos from other times. The triumphant white faces grinning over the charred body of a Black man they had lynched. The twisted corpse of Chief Big Foot frozen in snow after the massacre at Wounded Knee. The big thumbs-up from an evidently too-cheerful American MP posing above the battered body of a murdered Iraqi prisoner.

The connections are instantaneous. The truth visceral. The conclusions difficult to miss.

I make no claim that a solitary photo could thoroughly explain a war of conquest, prove the intrinsically destructive character of the American project or explain the devastating consequences of it’s innocuously titled “free enterprise” system. Nor does the knowledge and understanding required to liberate this fragile world come without investigation, study and a relentless thirst for truth.

But there are times a simple photograph, a few pictures or maybe a series of images may reveal enough the ugliness lurking beneath the comforting veneer of reassuring sound bytes, and what’s merely alleged becomes utterly irrefutable, denials wither away, and the passive spectator becomes the passionate advocate.

Which brings us to President Obama’s newfound determination to oppose the court-ordered release of photographs showing American-held prisoners being abused and tortured. All bases are covered.

On one hand he offers the standard – and quite disingenuous – flag-waving excuse – that releasing the pictures will “inflame anti-American opinion” (as opposed to the good feelings generated by U.S. bombing runs on Afghani villagers) and “put our troops in greater danger” (unlike his decision to provide them a more safe working environment by shipping thousands of soldiers into Afghan combat zones).

One the other hand we are told that these same photos are actually not that big a deal – neither “particularly sensational” – nor providing “any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals.”

Obscured by the President’s rationales for censorship are some simple truths. If you don’t want people to hate you, don’t do bad things. If you’re truly concerned about young people’s safety, don’t send them off to dangerous places in the first place.

While the torture illustrated in these photographs may no longer be a secret, the release of additional photos – and there’s possibly a few thousand of them still under wraps – can give a more accurate picture of the scope of the abuse, a better sense of it’s systematic character and a clearer understanding the type of depraved thinking employed by those who ordered it done.

To see, with our own eyes, the horrors and degradation that America has inflicted, makes it more difficult to dispassionately file these events away in a soon-to-be-forgotten cabinet of reprehensible acts, and more likely to respond to them for what they are – intolerable crimes against living breathing human beings. Too often people remain unmoved by even the most outrageous of facts and figures. It’s not so easy to turn away when the statistic has a face.