Although a democracy requires constant vigilance regarding censorship, too little attention is paid to how bad news is hidden in plain view. It often is enough to frame disclosures within a larger context of justification–the war on terror, the economy, the electoral campaign–and it certainly helps to treat them as just the daily news, page 6, nothing special. Both strategies are evident in a recent report in the New York Times that included this photo:

The report was titled “Double Bombings in an Iraqi town Kill 35 and Wound 62.” Awful, right? And that’s before you know that the attackers were targeting both a wedding caravan and the medics that arrived after the first explosion. The words “civil war” never appear in the story, however. What does appear is the photograph, but it shows the aftermath of a third bombing, one in Baghdad that killed nine Iraqis and one US soldier. So, the news about the continuing (escalating?) carnage throughout Iraq is there but not there, in print but displaced by this photograph (and another as well) about an assault on US troops. And in this photo we see not the dead or wounded but rather an able-bodied soldier working like a traffic cop after an accident. The war could be smackdown between SUVs and other vehicles, not a bloody cycle of violence killing thousands of civilians. The bad news is reported, but it becomes easy to see it as something else.

But even this photograph reveals too much, so it had to be framed with this caption: “An American soldier secured an area on Baghdad on Thursday after a car bombing killed a soldier and nine Iraqis. An American patrol seemed to be the target.” Now look at the photo, and keep in mind that you are looking at a “secure area.” Does it look secure, or would “wrecked” be closer to the truth? The cars in the background are destroyed and the shops along the street have been seriously damaged. Rubble and debris can be cleaned up, but the trauma will extend well beyond the physical wreckage. (Two Americans and 23 Iraqis were wounded.) Note also the damaged Humvee being towed away. The costs extend in every direction, which is how the US can spend $341,000,000 per day on the war. The soldier who supposedly is doing the securing seems to be following the tow truck while talking into his radio, probably to report that the mission has been accomplished. In short, securing the area means deploying troops to allow removal of the dead and wounded and any damaged equipment, then leaving again. It does not mean rebuilding Iraq.

The road in the photograph used to be called Death Road because of all the explosions, but it had been quieter lately. Secure, one might have said, until this bomb, which one shopkeeper said was the worst of the 19 bombings he has seen on the street. The news is not good and current US policy is not going to make it better, but that’s hard to see when right there in plain view.

Photograph by Moises Saman for the New York Times.

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Coverage of the war in Iraq has been showing signs of fatigue lately, and for good reason. Now into the fifth year of the war, yet another parade of generals in Washington provided little consolation amidst the steady death toll–32 US soldiers in March, 46 so far this April, as well as hundreds of Iraqi deaths–and the many, many more who are wounded, traumatized, or refugees. But how many photos can you take of troops tramping through homes or dispensing medical care or just killing time? How often will we look at another bombed out vehicle or another general on PR duty? The carnage continues, but we all know that the political situation is not getting any better, everything is on hold until after the presidential election, and everyone is getting tired. Perhaps that’s why there have been a number of images lately like this:

It may be the season for sandstorms, but you wouldn’t have known it in previous years. Now, however, the slide shows have many variations on this shot. The sand is so comprehensive that it acts like an optical filter. The soldiers seem suspended like a prehistoric bug in amber. The one on the left has become doll-like, a GI Joe figure to be moved around but incapable of changing anything. The one on the right could be lost in thought. Everything is slowed down, grinding to a halt, as if there were sand in the gears of history.

If there had been only one of the sandstorm images, I would have let it pass. But they kept appearing, and then I noticed that there was another series also being spooled out. Images like this one:

This is a photograph taken through the night vision equipment used by US troops. The fact that the photo is taken through a scope or similar instrument while on patrol gives these images some sense of action, but there still is the sense that everything is happening in slow motion. Slow probably is good when men are walking around with guns at night, but the photo creates a sense of suspended animation. The green filter is not eco-friendly green but rather something from a heavy dream. Warriors stand in archetypal tableau as if at the gates of some netherworld. The green air is noxious, miasmic. The war is not a place for action; it is a place that will never change.

Both images may be surreal–or prophetic. They also might be examples of what we could call “optical noise.” That term could refer to the visual din in images cluttered with signage, but I’m referring to something else. Each photograph is an image of the war, but one in which the visual equivalent of white noise is omnipresent. That noise doesn’t occlude the image but it does interfere with emotional response. And, of course, it is tiring.The first photograph shows a scene that could be clear at another time; the second shows something that would be invisible without the cyborg eye. In neither case are we able to see clearly. In both we have a metaphor for the present state of the war, one in which we have seen too much and yet not enough. A war in which everything seems mired in sand, trapped in a bad dream, waiting for change, for clarity.

Photographs by Alaa Al-Marjani/Associated Press and Rafiq Maqool/Associated Press. (The first is from Najaf, Iraq; the second is from Mandozi, Afghanistan. There are many night vision images from Iraq, but this was the one close at hand when putting up this post. There are differences between the two wars, but both now are subject to optical noise, which is created by the repetition of stock images while providing a metaphor for the current stalemate.)

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This photograph stopped me in my tracks:

The power of an image depends on both composition and context. To explain the impact of this photograph, I need to say a few words about the moral dimension of contemporary public life.

Although some don’t like to admit it, democratic politics rightly includes a certain amount of ethical sloppiness. Instead of authoritarian enforcement of moral order, democracy encourages people to negotiate with others, overlook differences in lifestyle, and settle for agreement on outcomes rather than principles. But if the competition for votes and the enforcement of policies becomes completely separated from ethics, democracies can become corrupted.

Recent events in the news have made the this growing danger all too clear. Three items need to be connected. First, we now know that torture was not the work of rogue soldiers, but rather was discussed and approved at the highest levels of the administration. Nor was this done in a general manner, but rather through highly detailed accounts of specific methods of abuse in tandem with carefully planned strategies for institutional protection of the government. In other words, the case has been made for prosecution of the current administration as war criminals. Second, the New York Times discovered that the “independent” military analysts giving “objective” assessments on the television news channels have been dutifully relaying administration propaganda to promote the war, and doing so while also in the employ of defense industries profiting from the war. In short, an influential sector of the press has become the propaganda organ for a criminal administration. Third, there was the ABC presidential nomination debate, which seemingly was modeled on “American Idol” while avoiding all major questions of policy, save for when the questioner promoted further reduction in the capital gains tax. What should be a forum for deliberative argument became instead a lesson in how to use entertainment and ideology to avoid thinking about reality.

In this context, it will be very easy for people to lose their ethical bearings while cynicism triumphs. “All politicians are alike.” “There’s nothing we can do.” “At least we’re not fanatics.” Perhaps it was because of this background of ethical complacency or defeatism that I was shaken by the photograph above.

Let’s look at it more closely. A man is carrying an injured woman after a car bombing in Baqouba, a provincial capital northeast of Baghdad. (The bombing was part of yet another attack in the insurgency and civil war unleashed by the US invasion.) Behind the man, another woman is also being helped as she holds a cloth to her face. Behind her, a boy has been bloodied as well. The background also includes a police vehicle and personnel, and then a curb, fence, trees, and the rest of an orderly, pleasant scene like you might see in any suburban neighborhood in the US. But for the women’s garb and the beret on the soldier, they could be entering a suburban hospital. Thus, there is a declension of violence from most injured to uninjured, and, for many viewers, a declension of identification from least familiar in the foreground to most familiar in the background. Working against this tendency, the wounded are being brought into the viewer’s space, as if from a common background through a rupture created by war to further disrupt our world.

But the war is not materially disruptive for most Americans. It is easy to forget the harm being done. Until you look into his eyes. That look is what stops me from turning the page, changing the subject, and no longer caring. The rest of the scene is now a staple of world news; the victims are offered to us for our reactions, which may also become equally habitual and brief. No strong demand is made. By looking into the camera, the man activates the visual grammar of demand, but he is not demanding. This is not a call for vengeance or justice or mercy or help. It does beyond that. He stands there not as a victim but as a human being, and he asks for one thing–the most important thing–which is to look at what we have done. Facing a culture of willful blindness, he looks us in the eye and asks that we see.

The phrase that instantly came to mind was the question posed by attorney Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Finally reaching the limit of his tolerance of the Senator’s abuse of the privileges of free speech and congressional power, Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” To regain our moral center, the citizens of the US must do what the administration and too many members of the press have willfully refused to do: Ask the question this photograph is asking: How can you do this? Have you no sense of decency? No sense of shame?

Photograph by Adem Hadei/Associated Press.

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