The Western media has chosen not to run the graphic pictures of the children killed in Gaza this weekend (nota bene: this is not the picture above, which shows members of the Daloo family during the children’s funeral yesterday).
Priest Giles Fraser asks: do pictures of children killed in Gaza force us to face a gruesome reality?
Let’s start slowly, carefully, with what can be said. Photographs show four small children dead on the cold aluminium surface of the morgue.
They are positioned in such a way that they look like they might be sleeping together. Are these pictures real? Are they staged? That already feels too suspicious a question to be asking so early on. And one’s emotional instincts will rail against the premature engagement of critical faculties. But one needs to bracket out the feelings just for a moment.
Earlier photographs have come in from multiple reputable agencies showing these children being pulled out of the rubble. Other images show numerous film crews witnessing the same event. The children’s bodies are accompanied by the press to the morgue. Those who are trained to spot discrepancies in this sort of story believe that it hangs together. The pictures are real, so it is concluded. And once that is accepted, one immediately feels more than a little uncomfortable that their provenance was ever questioned. Like disbelieving a rape victim when she first tells you her story.
So they are real. Dead children, killed by an Israeli missile while still in their pyjamas and the sort of clothes suited to playing in the street. The western media has chosen not to show them.
Read the rest here.
Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP
Women and Violence in El Salvador, a slide show: http://nyr.kr/Q8mN46
“The Salvador Option”
The following is from After El Salvador by Jacinda Woodhead,
But more than that, I wondered what had changed about us, the audience, that we could sit there listening to these descriptions of torture, laughing in all the right places. We used to be outraged by the CIA’s training of death squads, by its trail of destruction in Central America, South America, Africa, by the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.
By El Salvador, where close to 100 000 people were killed or disappeared in the 70s and early 80s.
At noon, the men were blindfolded and killed in the town’s centre. Among them was Amaya’s husband, who was nearly blind. In the early afternoon the young women were taken to the hills nearby, where they were raped, then killed and burned. The old women were taken next and shot. … From her hiding place, Amaya heard soldiers discuss choking the children to death; subsequently she heard the children calling for help, but no shots. Among the children murdered were three of Amaya’s, all under ten years of age …
Later in Salvador, Joan Didion writes that the perpetrators of the Mozote Massacre (above) were ‘trained by American advisers’.
Journalist Allan Nairn revealed that the CIA trained the Salvadoran death squads in the use of interrogation and torture, and supplied security forces with various forms of surveillance for thousands of dissidents who went on to be murdered.
Often, they brought them to the headquarters of the treasury police, the national guard, the army and they tortured for them days. One former member of the Salvadoran treasury police, Rene Hurtado, described a course that was given at army general staff headquarters where American officers gave instruction in techniques including electroshock torture. Hurtado himself said he conducted such torture. He said, these are his words: ‘You put wires on the prisoner’s vital parts. You place the wires between the prisoner’s teeth, on the penis, on the vagina. The prisoners feel it more so the feet are in the water, and they are seated on iron so the blow is stronger… When it’s over, you just throw him in the alleys with a sign saying, Mano Blanco, ESA (Secret Anticommunist Army), or Maximiliano Hernandez Brigade.’
Seven years ago, the US announced they were establishing assassination squads in Iraq to target Sunni rebels; it’s appellation: ‘The Salvador Option.’ Nairn observed that on the one hand it was a perverse joke, but on the other, at least the US was finally admitting its involvement.
Jayel Aheram, from one of the emails sent to his stepfather while stationed at Combat Outpost Rawah in the Al Anbar province in Iraq.
Thank you for sharing this.
(via againstpower)
