Democracy Tested by Images

Tomorrow, Thursday, Barack Obama was supposed to have made public the photos of prisoners tortured in Iraq and in Afghanistan by their American jailers. Yet, after having listened to his generals, Obama went back on his initial decision, which was that of transparency in accordance with his first gesture as president-elect: re-criminalizing torture.

According to Obama, his act of censorship was motivated by two reasons. One, that the photos would not have illuminated what we already knew. The other, that the divulgence of such images would have endangered American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When they appeared at the end of April 2004, didn’t the snapshots of Abu Ghraib up the world’s anti-Americanism by a notch?

This hypothesis of the blaster-photos is fought, even in the United States. Some believe that their most ferocious enemies do not need pretexts to be hardliners. Others think that you must show everything, say everything, even if it could threaten the country’s security. This is the price democracies have to pay to progress.

But photos have an immediate power of persuasion that text doesn’t have. Before April 2004, articles described the torture practiced in American prisons. Nobody reacted. But when the images were published, indignation was as sudden as it was total. It’s a question of language: that of the photographer is immediately comprehensible. It hits hard and is memorized well. Barack Obama, the most photographed person in the world, knows that. A photo is sometimes like a ticking time bomb. To show or not to show the unspeakable: a difficult dilemma for a president enamored of freedom, including that of informing.