The pictures say it all–or do they? Sordid echoes of the past. Now, ironically transposed: American captors, Iraqi prisoners. A testimony to the reversibility of the pontifical discourse that underlay the invasion. Even, finally, the admitted risk of some equivalence of measure. Yet equivalence can be destabilizing when your project is justified within a moralizing frame, when ‘our freedom’ and your lack of it is used to legitimize invasion and occupation. It is telling but hardly surprising, then, that as evidence of systemic complicity with the torture at Abu Ghraib Prison continues to grow, Rumsfeld & co. have disavowed the abuse not simply because of its uncontestable and universal repugnance, but because it is particularly ‘Un-American.’ ‘American,’ that marker of exceptional morality which needs to posit itself above and beyond the norm. But let us examine further this exceptionalism.

To be sure, there is nothing specifically American about the torture–that the coalition forces share with those from whom they seek safe distance. But what about the form that the violence has taken, the specific tactics of humiliation through humour that seem to speak to a larger dialogue, and, more starkly, their photographing? There is, perhaps, something particularly American about the theatrics of capture: the well-posed snapshots of pain made light through the lens of the camera. The photographs from Abu Ghraib arguably speak to the politics of representation that bind together America’s mediatized society; to the cultural systemic. The lens through which the Iraqi–as ‘other’–is viewed, reduced, effaced is equally that through which the inherently moral ‘American’ is constructed.

The pictures say it all. Almost as disturbing as the figures of the tortured Iraqi prisoners are the expressions of their captors–waving, pointing, mocking, smiling, in smug condescension. It is violence made all the more disconcerting because of its perverse parody; its pastiche; its collage of reality–pain and humiliation–with its staged antithesis. "In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown, hands reflexively crossed over their genitals," Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker exposé of the abuses reads. Through the lens of the camera, the violence at Abu Ghraib is made not just the infliction of suffering, but the repudiation of its co-temporal reality; the allusion to yet dismissal of every sort of victimhood, of personhood, of subjectivity. The prisoners are mere comic props. Like many things with the current war, the photographed violence at Abu Ghraib is in the end not about the Iraqi prisoners at all: it is torture, but it is not about the victim, and in this lies its piercing degradation.

What is surely startling about these images is the stark immaturity they flaunt–the viewer sees them as the captors had them staged: as a mockery of reality. That immaturity can so easily be transposed into explicit cruelty is frightening. But why should we think of these incidents as anything more than the perverse antics of immature young soldiers, following orders, perhaps, but taking liberties with the photographic lens? Simply answered, the violence at Abu Ghraib is violent in its immaturity, its purposive immaturity. It is a humor of particularism, entrenched in cultural codes and transmitted through the camera, that at once parodies and rejects its subjects, overrides them and addresses its own discourse. It is not just torture, it is performance, and it speaks to the culture of the camera, as instrument, as weapon, as medium for diminution and distancing. Your suffering is real only in our world of parody, your pain extant only as fodder for our photography, our lens, our memories, our pastiche of you.

A few weeks ago, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for official investigation of a photograph depicting juvenility comparable in tenor, albeit muted in form: two young Iraqi boys smiling sheepishly for the camera, thumbs up, one holding a sign penned in English: "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad th(en) he knocked up my sister!" An American soldier stands to the side of the boy, to the side of the sign, grinning, thumb up at his coded victory; souvenirs of the foray, another snapshot to show the boys at the base. Numerous such pictures have reportedly been traded alongside the photographs from Abu Ghraib, like mementos from a college road-trip: American soldiers grinning brashly in front of mosques, imitating WWF wrestlers whilst standing in tanks, gloating for the camera in Saddam Hussein’s palaces. We came, we saw, we captured.

The photographs from Abu Ghraib similarly presume an audience that shares with them a cultural inside and a common medium of capture. They gesture towards spectators who may not approve, but who will understand; viewers that will recognize in these images a macabre imitation of the perverse elements of popular culture–Beavis and Butthead generalized, transported, and caught on camera. The possibility of an audience calls forth the performance.

The ‘imagined community’ of recognition to which the captors wave is itself hyperbolized reality: one fed on easily digestible commodifications of the war, transmitted through newsflashes in breaks between the unreality of reality TV. Where is the space for humanistic equivalence in this world of byte-sized real-time, in this conformity of easy consumption? Life itself becomes inherently parodic: the triumph of Good over Evil, Our war, Our sacrifice, those Iraqis–loyal, troublesome, fractious–you never can tell, We the saviors, back to the domestic election agenda, if we ever did depart from it. Throw in a bit of Condoleezza Rice testifying in between–we must, of course, vindicate the objectivity of our subjectivism; the spectrum of critique remains firmly grounded in the ‘us.’ Iraqis matter to the extent that they fit into the space constructed for them by the validating lens of the popular media. They speak when they are supposed to or are silenced by the din of the mob, beamed across screens in unnerving flashes. At this collapsing boundary between the real and its mimetic parody, where now stands the unreal?

That the captors not only performed but documented their abuses, or, rather, performed with such particularity because of the possibility of documentation, speaks to the self-referentiality of the frame: torture is rendered primarily as a theatric set for these stills of satirized pornography, their American dramatists posed in the foreground. Eliciting, perhaps, a suppressed smirk from the audience. Somewhere in there, the possibility of mimicking an already parodied reality begins to appear more important than the acts of humiliation themselves. Is this urge to document and interlocute through the camera, then, not the most perverse instance of a cultural frame itself immersed in the Hollywoodization of daily life, of reality itself? The mediatized insularity of the ‘us’ has itself created the conditions of possibility for these images by providing the context, the discourse, to which they speak. In these photographs we see uncanny fragments of an unexamined self, and are both repulsed and fascinated by them.

Abu Ghraib, too, now transposed into a site of ‘us.’ Amidst this staged reality, the victim has evapourated.

There is another photographic journal of the war–one that posits the camera as lens of cultural conquest.

SHAKIRAH ESMAIL-HUDANI is a senior at Harvard University. Email: hudani@fas.harvard.edu