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'Cam-phones in Iraq' story may be fake
From: dave () farber net
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 16:59 -0400
...... Forwarded Message ....... From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall () SIMS Berkeley EDU> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 13:43:30 -0700 (PDT) Subj: Re: [IP] IP: 'Cam-phones in Iraq' story may be fake Susan Sontag put the whole thing rather well in last Sunday's NYT Magazine. (I've excerpted three great paragraphs from her story below) ---- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html Regarding the Torture of Others Susan Sontag A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers -- recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities -- and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe. There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real events in real time -- life isn't edited, why should its record be edited? -- has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am -- waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. [...] Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal. What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joseph Lorenzo Hall, SIMS PhD Student; UC Berkeley. [web:<http://pobox.com/~joehall/>, blog:<http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb>] ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- 'Cam-phones in Iraq' story may be fake dave (May 25)