Photo fetish

You may have noticed a slight downtick in posting hereabouts. Truth is, there’s little left to say about the disaster of Iraq, and yet, little else to talk about.

The awfulness of it all, from the lies to the ever-longer list of the dead, to the crimes at Abu Ghraib—and all of it, all of it for nothing—it defies at least my ability to do it justice. The big picture is too big.

So let’s look at one little pixel, so to speak. There are a bunch of pictures on DoD laptops of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib that the Republican party does not want you to see. Or so they say. I doubt that they care whether those photos are made public or not. What they do care about is keeping our collective focus on the photos and not the acts photographed.

Whether we see the photos or not, the crimes did happen. US soldiers committed them. US soldiers following orders set down by their superior officers, who in their turn were following the directives of their political masters in the Pentagon, CIA, and White House.

If we as a nation are to demonstrate that we are better than this, that these crimes though they were committed in our name did not have our consent, those political masters must be voted out of office.

The photos don’t matter. I don’t need to see them. I’m already ashamed.

Filed under: politics/war