The Image and the Imagined

On CITV which is aimed at very young children (mine and yours) something called the HM Armed Forces are relentlessly advertised. In a response to my (rejected) complaint to the ASA these adverts were compared to being “know different than ‘tin soldiers’.

I’ll be publishing the correspondence and pointing out that tin soldiers don’t stand accused of rape and torture. This is propaganda by the British State aimed at very young children. Anyone interested in helping this campaign – wqith legal advice or facebook campaigning – should contact us at: [email protected]

The issue stands in marked contrast to the withholding of key images as Pulse Media reports:

“The issue is not simply that these photographs pose a danger to the safety of existing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan or the 30,000 soon to be deployed, but that they present more evidence that questions the legitimacy of what we now know will be an ongoing war; and this threat to the state’s legitimacy exists both internationally and domestically. The bottom line is that these images will challenge our perception of ourselves, of our national identity, and will exacerbate the anxieties of an administration already struggling to gain public approval.

What do we know about the images that we cannot see? In a Justice Department brief, two of the 21 images in question include a photograph of soldiers posing beside detainees who are handcuffed to bars with sandbags over their heads while one soldier positions a broom in the direction of one detainee’s rectum, and a second soldier appears to strike an Iraqi detainee with the butt of his rifle.

What we do not know is whether these descriptions represent the worst or best of the images in that collection. Considering the images from Abu Ghraib, perhaps we do not need to stretch our minds very far in order to imagine the possible nature of pictures whose description and thus corporeality, are being hidden from us.

If released, these images will make plain what many of us already knew to be true: that the previous administration’s claim that the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident carried out by ‘a few bad apples’ was a lie. Although the lie will be in reference to events that took place four years ago, the questions that it will provoke will concern the circumstances today, and we will seek answers for these questions from the new administration.”

Read the full  article here.