Image accomplished. The mission may be awaiting final resolution, but the Iraq War has now delivered what could become its signature image, a Kodak Moment of creepiness that shows a hooded Iraqi seemingly wired for electro-torture by American military guards at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
President George W. Bush has done Arab-television interviews, and his administration has issued multiple apologies. But the visual impression has already been stamped on the world's collective consciousness.
"One of the things you learn in this business," says Bobby Mueller, head of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and an ex-Marine left paralyzed from the waist down by wounds suffered in that conflict, "is that image counts so much more than words. People do things because of how they feel, not how they think."
The photo of the lone, backlit figure - precariously perched on a box, arms extended with open palms as if bestowing a blessing - almost seems to be mimicking the giant statue of Jesus that commands a mountaintop overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
But it also has darker connotations: Dickens' spooky ghost of Christmas Future ... a shadowy Ku Klux Klansman ... the Grim Reaper.
That hooded figure is one of 14 pictures that have come to light so far. Most of the rest are X-rated. They feature naked Iraqi prisoners in various stages of degradation, some stacked like blocks to form perverse human pyramids, others forced to perform choreographed sex acts.
One battered and bruised detainee obviously suffered garden-variety brutality: He allegedly was simply beaten to death.
In many of the photos Army Reserve men and women assigned to the 372nd Military Police Company can be seen mugging for the camera, flashing big grins and triumphant thumbs-up.
Oddly, no news photographer surreptitiously shot the damning evidence. Guards turned the cameras on themselves, then, apparently, made no serious attempt to keep a lid on their photographs. Some eventually fell into the hands of a superior officer, and ultimately the world.
"Something fundamentally has changed," says Donald Winslow, publications editor of the National Press Photographers Association, referring to the proliferation of non-professional images in today's culture and how quickly they can make their way into the mainstream media. Blame the self-publishing ethos of the Internet and advances in photo technology.
