focuses on Neda’s face. Her eyes turn from wide-open alarm to vacant as she bleeds out onto the pavement. Within hours, the video was uploaded on YouTube. By the end of the day it had become a “trending topic” on Twitter, and Neda’s story was quickly picked up by other media. Time magazine called it “probably the mostly widely witnessed death in human history” (Mahr 2009). It was one of the sharpest indictments of the ayatollahs in thirty years of Islamic rule. Nicholas Kristof (2009) called the Tehran uprising “the quintessential 21st-century conflict. On one side are government thugs firing bullets. On the other side are young protestors firing ‘tweets.’ ” The incident led to the quip: “Two mullahs gaze out on a crowd of protesters in Tehran. The one says, ‘Arrest the correspondents.’ To which the despondent reply is: ‘But they’re all correspondents!’ ” (Roger Cohen 2009).
New media serve as pathways for new norms. Charli Carpenter (2012) suggests that “the single biggest shift in the sociology of war in the past quarter-century has been not in the way it is fought, but in the relationship between its grim realities and the perceptions of those on the home front … the increasing visibility of ordinary warfare.” This is partly the visual and narrative product of a new kind of “advocacy journalism” or “journalism of attachment” that isn’t shy about taking sides in conflicts (Hammond 2002). But countless nodes of data also provide unprecedented exposure and access (Kaempf 2013). Video (sometimes called the other “air war”) and jpegs are backed up by NGO reports, journalistic accounts, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents, leaked or hacked information, data compiled by body-counters scouring news outlets, and up-to-the-minute local content. During the Iraq War an anonymous Baghdad blogger known as Riverbend (2005) became an internet celebrity as she chronicled the occupation through the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. Anyone could download an “Iraqi death estimator” in order to track, like a national debt clock, the mounting civilian toll.
Images have become almost the sine qua non to distinguish particular atrocities from the general tragedy of war. The Haditha killings came to light only after a videotape of the bodies was circulated by the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, an Iraqi NGO. The notoriety of the case of Baha Mousa, the hotel receptionist tortured to death by British soldiers in Basra, was almost guaranteed by the visual narrative that surfaced. The “before” images consisted of a one-minute movie taken on a soldier’s cell phone at the beginning of Mousa’s interrogation. The footage showed Mousa, hooded and handcuffed, being screamed at and forced into painful stress positions by the soldiers. The “after” images consisted of 46 autopsy photographs released at the inquest, including a close-up of the grotesquely bruised face of the dead Iraqi, two plastic tubes protruding from his mouth, apparently from an attempt to resuscitate him. Google “Baha Mousa” and that particular image appears, unbidden, on the results page, even before you click any of the links.
Public opinion can pivot on a seminal photograph. During the Yugoslav wars, sympathy for the Bosnian cause was galvanized almost overnight by Roy Gutman’s Newsday stories and Britain’s Independent Television News footage of gaunt Bosnian prisoners peering through the barbed wire of a Serbian concentration camp—echoes of the Holocaust. New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks’s stunning images of four boys killed by an Israeli airstrike while they played on a beach in Gaza prompted one of the IDF’s few formal investigations into the conduct of the war. Some images, such as the Abu Ghraib jpegs, reflect the naïve gaze of the tourist-as-torturer. Others are deliberately composed to create “witnessing publics”—not passive onlookers but responsible, implicated viewers forced to take a moral stand (Torchin 2006). Sharon Sliwinski’s description of Francisco de Goya’s harrowing etchings of the Napoleonic wars in Spain, “The Disasters of War” (1810–1815), could easily apply to many recent images from Bosnia, Darfur, or Iraq:
Spectators are positioned to gaze upon these terrors from the viewpoint of a bystander. Each composition is carefully arranged as a fragile bridge between the spectator’s perspective and the events occurring in the picture. The sense of proximity transforms the viewer into a witness … spectators are called into these scenes, summoned to face these terrible events as if they were present. (Sliwinski 2011:51)
This kind of image politics is central to the promotion of human rights. Pictures put a face on abuses, often training attention on individuals in a sea of suffering. Advocacy campaigns increasingly use locally sourced content remixed with global ideas. “See it, film it, change it” is the mantra of the Witness Project, whose “Cameras Everywhere” initiative sought to put movie cameras in the hands of people in the midst of conflicts.
This democratization of access and exposure has unsettled what had been the carefully managed visual landscape of war (L. Kennedy 2009). During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland decried the unfiltered television coverage of the first living-room war. “Without censorship,” he said, “things can get terribly confused in the public mind” (quoted in Tsouras 2005:65). When the Abu Ghraib story broke in a flurry of digital photographs, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lamented the difficulties of operating “in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photos” (quoted in L. Kennedy 2009:817). Rumsfeld was worried that the Abu Ghraib pictures were being circulated in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which protect prisoners of war against “insults and public curiosity.” But he was also watching the official narrative of the war slip away. It was impossible to reconcile a “humanitarian” war with photos of prisoners being humiliated and tortured by American M.P.s. (who are mugging it up for the camera). The pictures revealed what is usually unseen and unknown in wartime: the interior environments of detention centers, interrogation rooms, and prison cells, as well as the tools of torture—leashes, black hoods, dogs, chemical light tubes, broomsticks, electrical wire. Glimpses of the banality of abuse in situ made systematic torture seem all the more plausible (Whitty 2010:696).
Cameras are everywhere in today’s wars. Overhead, drones, satellites, and remote sensing reveal panoramic effects of conflicts. This “human rights mapping” has identified artillery placed in civilian zones, mass executions and grave sites, homes targeted based on the ethnicity of the inhabitants, political prison camps, the removal of civilian populations, and the destruction of villages (Marx and Goward 2013). The UN monitors humanitarian crises via its proprietary UNOSAT satellite system, sometimes publishing images of events as they unfold—of civilian convoys fleeing Chad’s war-riven capital N’Djamena in February 2008, or of pockmarked fields where the Sri Lankan Air Force bombed a civilian “safe haven” in spring 2009. The technological capabilities of NGOs to remotely monitor conflicts now outstrip the capacity of many state governments. Amnesty International’s “Eyes on Darfur” project shows before-and-after satellite photographs of villages burned and depopulated by the Janjaweed. Working with experts from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Amnesty has used similar geospatial technologies to convey displacement and destruction in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, in Kyrgyzstan, New Orleans, Sri Lanka, Chad, Georgia, Lebanon, Burma, Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Syria, and Burundi.
Images from the front line convey the day-to-day reality of war, the visceral as well as the mundane. These are YouTube wars (N. Cohen 2010). Soldiers upload combat videos to the web; e-mail souvenir jpegs to friends; tweet from the war zone; or post text and image on “milblogs.” Much of this content humanizes military experience, showing the decidedly anti-heroic life of the enlisted man or woman. But other images show spectacular levels of violence. One clip filmed by U.S. ground troops in Iraq showed two airstrikes on a large, apparently new, mosque that possibly had been used by insurgents as a firing position or a weapons cache—the video gives no context. The first missile flattens the main body of the mosque; the second explodes the minaret. A billow of dust lifts, and nothing but rubble remains. The ground soldiers seem awestruck. “Bad-aaaaas. That was sweeeeeet,” says one.24
With this much information in play, media management teams can’t be far behind. Belligerents marshal evidence and tailor information much like public relations firms. In 2007 the U.S. Department of Defense launched its own YouTube channel, MNFIRAQ (Multi-National Force—Iraq) (“the
