ABSTRACT
The most prominent and widely circulated visual images from the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are, without a doubt, the notorious photographs of the torture of prisoners taken by American soldiers at Saddam Hussein's former prison, Abu Ghraib. One in particular has circulated globally as an icon of the war: the photograph of the hooded prisoner on a box with electrical wires dangling from his outstretched arms. Also instantly recognizable is the photograph of US soldier Lynndie England gloating over a prone male prisoner on a leash. These two images join a constellation of other horrifying images of captivity from the terror-filled “war on terror”: footage of the execution of American reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan; a photograph of the bound, blindfolded, and naked John Walker Lindh, nicknamed “the American Taliban”; footage of British hostage Margaret Hassan, the humanitarian worker in Iraq, pleading for her life; footage of shackled, manacled, and masked “detainees” being transported to the cage-like prison in the US base at Guantánamo; footage of the bodies of captured American contractors hanging from a bridge in Fallujah, Iraq; footage of Saddam Hussein in captivity, on trial, at his execution by hanging, and deceased.
