A prisoner at Abu Ghraib is handcuffed naked to a cell door. (Photo: The Washington Post)
Before the thick fog of government censorship stifled electronically mediated videos and pictures of savage state violence and repression in the streets of Tehran, one image became both a rallying point and an iconic symbol of the fierce protest movement challenging the allegedly stolen election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the repressive nature of the Islamic Republic founded in 1979. The "Neda video" filmed by two people holding a camera phone graphically shows in disturbing detail a 26-year-old woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, lying in a pool of blood on a Tehran street, unable to speak as her father bends over her stunned body and pleads with her to hold on. The horror of the scene revealed itself more acutely with the juxtaposed images of a once-vibrant Neda smiling serenely into the camera - as if she were gently seeking the viewer's gaze and asking for justice. She died as a result of being shot in the chest by a plainclothes member of the Basij militia. The now-deceased victim, whose blood-streaked face is captured on video, communicates powerfully not just the needless suffering and death of an innocent woman, but also the brutality and harsh violence of state-sponsored repression. In spite of the seriousness of the crime and the global indignation it has produced, the Iranian government thus far has refused to launch an investigation of Neda's death and banned any public funerals or memorials. As Glen Greenwald rightly insists, "Like so many iconic visual images before it - from My Lai, fire hoses and dogs unleashed at civil rights protesters, Abu Ghraib - that single image has done more than the tens of thousands of words to dramatize the violence and underscore the brutality of the state response." <1> The image of Neda's death has kindled a global tsunami of moral outrage, turning her into both a coveted icon of collective resistance to state violence and a symbol of struggle for the promise of a future Islamic democracy. Indeed, given the concerted efforts by technophiles the world over, the event crystalized, for a moment, the emerging possibilities of new forms of global citizenship.
The dramatic Neda video reconfigured the ways in which an oppressive government attempted to define the boundaries of the possible, and the ways in which new spaces and modes of criticism came to exist nonetheless, no longer contained by official hierarchies of power and control. The image of Neda's death ruptured the circuit of dominant power and official knowledge that made anti-democratic policies acceptable, producing an outpouring of public anger while providing evidence of a state-supported atrocity and government repression that revealed and challenged the carefully managed way in which the Iranian government framed its perception of itself and its attempts to educate the wider society. For a moment, social and state power were made accountable in novel ways, held up to critical scrutiny, and challenged with a massive discharge of anguish and protests among students, intellectuals and a variety of other groups. The Neda video has now became an inseparable part of a historic legacy of images that have served to modify the nature of politics and government abuse by both making power visible and loosening the coordinates of government-sanctioned ways of seeing and knowing. Or, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière puts it in a different context, the video functions "to modify the visible, the ways of experiencing and perceiving the tolerable as intolerable."
The political importance of the power of the image to reveal government abuse and unleash public outrage was almost lost on members of the American media establishment when President Obama was asked by CNN's Suzanne Malveaux about his reaction to the Neda video. Obama responded by calling the image "heartbreaking," adding that "anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about that." <2> He then offered some support, however oblique, to those protesting Iran's contested election by quoting Dr. Martin Luther King's expression, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." <3> Fortunately, Helen Thomas, one of the more courageous reporters covering the White House, refused to accept his answer as a humble expression of grief and interrupted him with the question of how he might reconcile his positive statements about the Neda video and images of Iranians protesting in the streets of Tehran with his concerted attempts to block the release of photos of detainees abused and tortured abroad by the United States. Obama responded by suggesting that Thomas's question was out of line - in actuality, she was focusing on a contradiction that would seem to connect Obama more to the forces of government suppression and censorship than to those sympathetic to the ideals of freedom and government transparency. As Randy Cohen wrote in The New York Times, "We should not rebuke Iran for lack of openness and then resist it ourselves." <4> Glenn Greenwald further heightened the contradiction by asking, "How is it possible for Obama to pay dramatic tribute to the 'heartbreaking' impact of that Neda video in bringing to light the injustices of the Iranian government's conduct while simultaneously suppressing images that do the same with regard to our own government's conduct?" <5>
Obama publicly acknowledges the suffering of this young girl, but refuses to acknowledge or respond to the suffering and pain of those countless detainees tortured by US military and intelligence forces. In Obama's contradictory logic, the life of Neda Agha-Soltan is eminently grievable, but not the lives of those who have survived being murdered only to endure horrible abuses at the hands of US government employees, some of whom have most certainly committed war crimes. At the same time, Obama's invocation of the state secrecy privilege in refusing to release images of torture and abuse represents an attempt on the part of the Obama administration to ratify what kinds of government actions can be made visible and open to debate and what practices should be hidden from public purview, even if the government is guilty of war crimes. State secrecy operating in the service of abuse has more in common with dictatorships reminiscent of Pinochet's Chile, with its infamous torture chambers and willingness to "disappear" all those considered enemies of the state than it does with a vibrant and open democracy. Such secrecy shuts down public debate, makes the policies of governments invisible, and implies that state power should not be held accountable. But it does more. It sanctions criminal behavior, undermines the need for public dialogue, contaminates moral values, and furthers a culture of violence and cruelty by suggesting that those who criminally promote torture, break the law, and engage in human rights violations should not be held responsible for their actions.
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http://www.truthout.org/071209R
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