We Are Visual Creatures

I read this article today detailing the ongoing legal battle over whether to release photographs of abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush had refused to release the photographs after they first came to light. President Obama had initially reversed this decision, but after some apparently very persuasive arguments from the military, Obama changed his mind and signed a law forbidding the photos' release.

As I read, I kept asking myself, "Why are the president and the military so afraid of releasing these pictures?" The article took its sweet time answering that question. Finally, within the last few paragraphs, the article mentions that the photographs could pose a danger to troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the effect they would have on perceptions of those troops in the region. This, despite that fact that the contents of the photographs are known to the public (they are described in the article). Also public knowledge is the fact that some of the soldiers in the photographs were prosecuted for the actions recorded by the camera.

Apparently a verbal description of a photograph is nowhere near as damaging as the image itself. The people in the region must be aware that such abuses have taken place. Yet months of discussion of the abuses and resulting prosecutions will supposedly have a far lesser effect on people's perceptions than a few seconds of glancing at visual proof of those abuses.

How did our government and military come to this conclusion? I'd think that the Abu Ghraib scandal had a lot to do with it. Those abuses and the name of the prison where they occurred are forever etched into the memories of anyone who spent even a mere minutes looking at the Abu Ghraib photos. We learned then that images are much harder to erase from people's minds than words.

Seeing is believing, the saying goes. I think that for humans you could also say "seeing is remembering." The government is right to fear the power of images. Whether they are right to let that fear restrict the public's access to information is another case.