Abstract The photographs of torture in Iraq - taken by the perpetrators (American soldiers) themselves and e-mailed home as a souvenir - have been a public relations desaster for the American government. At the same time they reveal a new dimension of war photography. Not professional journalists but the US soldiers themselves document their actions, their fun and their atrocities. The torture scenes were in part designed just to be photographed.
Susan Sontag argues - contrary to the Bush administration - that the torture incidents in Iraq have a lot to do with "nature and heart of America". To her, they are an exponent of the increasing acceptance of brutality in the US since Bush's self-righteous "war against terrorism". The ideology of this war dehumanizes its enemies to such a degree that American soldiers feel perfelctly justified to torture prisoners "just for fun". |
Sontag, Susan  Susan Sontag was born in New York in 1933. She received her B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University and Saint Anne’s College, Oxford. Her books and essays cover a broad range of topics, and she is now one of America’s best-known and most admired writers.
Her publications include four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America; a collection of short stories, I, etcetera; a play, Alice in Bed; and six works of nonfiction, starting with Against Interpretation and including On Photography and Illness as Metaphor.
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