Soldiers' cameras share snapshot of life in Iraq

There have been so many interesting articles in the last few days with regard to the role technology has played in Iraq, that I've opened a special category called The military as citizen reporters.

This latest entry is from an article in The Miami Herald on how in Iraq, seemingly every soldier carries a camera and how "the photos have underscored the benefits and problems of technologies ubiquitous in Iraq, including cell and satellite phones, Internet cafes and digital cameras.

"From the prisons to the front lines, pocket cameras, many digital ones capable of whizzing uncensored images home, are nearly as standard among American soldiers' gear as rifles and dog tags.

Mostly they're used to take innocuous ''Hi Mom'' souvenir shots -- a smiling soldier in a faraway place.

But, as the Abu Ghraib prison case illustrates, the phenomenon can have unintended consequences -- as happened when shots of gleeful guards abusing naked prisoners became public months after the abuse occurred, and even as the Pentagon was trying to deal with the problem quietly, behind the scenes.

You can't make all the cellphones go away. You can't make all the digital cameras go away. The genie's out of the bottle,'' an officer said.

More than a year after the invasion, no official rules have been released governing the use of cameras, or restricting specifically what soldiers may photograph. Nobody reviews the photos before they are filed on the Internet-

And no one anticipates any rules soon -- beyond the admonition that mishandling classified information, even by accident in an otherwise innocent photo, is a crime, said a senior military officer, speaking on the condition that he not be identified."

For more related articles, cf Picturephoning's special category.

emily | 12:12 PM | The Military and Iraq. Images and Issues |
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/picturephoning/archives/2004/05/003853.htm

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