Proof or pornography? Release of grisly Hussein photos assailed
Posted on Friday, July 25 @ 10:25:13 EDT
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By Doug Saunders, Toronto Globe and Mail
Are they proof, or are they pornography?
The images of Saddam Hussein's infamous sons, their faces bloodied and mutilated by the torrent of U.S. bullets and rockets that ended their lives on Tuesday, were released by the White House yesterday and transmitted around the world, over and over again, by eager news media.
While U.S. President George W. Bush and other Washington officials defended the release of the photos yesterday as a necessary proof of success and resolve, others saw it as distasteful gloating, and some pointed out that it was exactly the sort of lurid display that the White House had condemned in the recent past.
When Arabic television networks broadcast photos of dead U.S. soldiers during the Iraq war this year, they were strongly criticized by the White House for overstepping the bounds of decency and violating human rights.
Despite the controversy, media outlets around the world did not hesitate to make use of the photos, which showed the head and shoulders of Uday and Qusay Hussein, their faces bloody, bruised, bloated and twisted. Uday appears to have suffered a wound through the mouth, which some U.S. officials said may have been self-inflicted. CNN showed the images for hours, drawing criticism from some journalists, as did the Arabic satellite stations Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.
For many Arabs, the photos of the brothers' heads carry a strong historical resonance. In the year 680, the Muslim leader Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Mohammed, was slaughtered along with his followers by rivals in the city of Karbala, in current Iraq.
His severed head was taken to Damascus and displayed in public, leading to a backlash in which Hussein became a martyr and the Shia branch of Islam was born. "In those days, before news photos," the Islamic historian Frederick M. Denny writes, "displaying the enemies' heads was a common way of publicizing something like the death of a movement."
U.S. officials yesterday seemed eager to renew this tradition.
"I honestly believe that these two are particularly bad characters," U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "And that it's important for the Iraqi people to see them, to know they're gone, to know they're dead, and to know they're not coming back."
Mr. Bush announced: "Now the Iraqi people have seen clearly the intent of the American people to ensure that they are free."
And Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, took full advantage of the symbolic value of the photos in a briefing yesterday.
"It will certainly help convince people of two things: that these two people are dead, but the more important point is that . . . the Baathists are finished. Saddam and his henchmen are finished. They're not coming back."
Some Arab observers criticized this as hypocritical. "When Iraq broadcast photos of dead American soldiers, the U.S. considered that against human rights," Jordanian political analyst Sahar al-Qassem told the Associated Press. "So, why are they violating that now by showing such inhumane pictures?"
Some Iraqis, however, said that the display of the photos was not aggressive enough. "Death is not enough. They should have been hung up on poles in a square in Baghdad so all Iraqis could see them. Then they should have died as people ate them alive," Baghdad businessman Khalil Ali told Reuters.
And it did not appear that the photos had weakened the resolve of Iraqi guerrillas loyal to deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. Yesterday, three U.S. soldiers, part of the division that had killed the sons, were slain in an ambush.
Three members of Mr. Hussein's Fedayeen militia later appeared on Al-Jazeera to take responsibility for the attack.
"We want to say to the occupation forces: They said last night that killing Uday and Qusay will diminish [resistance] attacks, but we want to say to them that their death will increase attacks against them," one of three masked men read from a statement.
TV news outlets in the United States splashed the images across their screens with a complete lack of reserve. During the Iraq war, many explicit images were kept off the screen, but yesterday the photos were shown almost non-stop.
This drew some criticism from within the U.S. media.
"I don't know that the networks need to play along to this degree," Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz said. "Obviously you would show those disturbing photos of two dead people for at least a few seconds — it's a legitimate part of the story — but already I am seeing this used as wallpaper, up for minutes at a time . . . I wonder if there's not a little exploitation going on, on the media's part as well."
CNN executives announced in a statement yesterday that they had displayed the photos "because of the important role these photos play in telling this story . . . In order to fully tell this story and better understand and gauge Iraqi reaction, we believe it is appropriate to show these photos."
Reprinted from The Toronto Globe And Mail:
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