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Abu Ghraib: The Pictures and the "Pictures"

Note: Tuesday postscript added with new link; go to end of item.

I'm working on something about the Iraqi prison torture photos that may or may not materialize into a City Pages column for next week, but meanwhile let me register my disappointment with those comrades-in-bloggery who have chosen to post today's latest round of alleged gang-rape photos.

(For reference purposes, here they are--along with a gratuitous prefatory reference to "US-based Jewish pornographers.") 

They're fake, they're easily discerned as such [see below], and passing them along as real seems more than a little perverse: We have already seen manifest horrors--magnified all the more if you understand even the rudiments of the Islamic culture of masculinity--and we know that images of rape (not just of adults, either) and, reportedly, murder do exist. It's only a matter of time before we see them, too.

So why pass around this garbage? When the screenwriter Dennis Potter was dying of pancreatic cancer, he named his tumor "Rupert." Here's evidence that there's a little Murdoch in lots of us.

Why They're Fakes

a) First, and most resoundingly, the soldiers are wearing dark green jungle camouflage gear, which--understandably, if you think about it--was not issued in Iraq.

b) The faces are camo-painted, too. Have you seen any other Abu Ghraib torture image in which a soldier tries to conceal his/her face? Isn't the lesson of the prison photos we've seen so far that anything went--that there was no sense of shame or circumspection about anything they were doing?

c) A forensic point: Look at the body posture of the woman in the first photo. She's standing under her own power. I have read a few accounts of rape over the years, in police files and in books, and I've heard of very few in which the woman did not strain physically--reflexively--to recoil from her attacker. This woman stands almost languidly. It's porn, and coarse, standard-issue porn at that.

d) A compositional point: Look at the third shot, of the "rapist"'s penis entering the "victim"'s mouth. In the rough and tumble of a real, forced sexual encounter that involved 2-3 guys crowded around a victim, this would be a very difficult photo to take. Not impossible, but extremely unlikely. On the other hand, this very shot is an obligatory part of any porn production, still or video.    

POSTSCRIPT: Reader Gary Grass sent along a link to a PDF download that contains not only more of the patently fake rape-porn--in some of which the "soldiers" can be seen wearing hightop sneakers and loafers--but also some croppings I hadn't seen before of previously released genuine Abu Ghraib images. (And some shots of troops marching naked Iraqis through the streets that made the rounds internationally some time ago, though I don't think they got much attention stateside, even from bloggers.)

Worth a look, but be aware that this link is not to a page; it triggers an automatic download of a 19-page document. Here.   

Posted by Steve Perry at May 10, 2004 5:53 PM

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