Working with the Frames of War

• Published in: Humanity (Philadelphia, Pa.) Pa.), 2017-04, Vol.8 (1), p.101-106
• Main Author: Dedieu, Jean-Philippe
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attorneys; Censorship; Civil liberties; Congressional hearings; Counterterrorism; Criminal investigations; Deployment; Detention; Discourses; Dissemination; Elaboration; Foreign policy; Frame analysis; Government agencies; Human rights; Imposition; Journalists; Law enforcement; Legislators; Mass media effects; Mass media images; Media violence; Military operations; Narration; Narratives; Photography; Political discourse; Politics; Portfolios; Questioning; Salience; September 11 terrorist attacks-2001; Siems, Larry; Terrorism; Torture; Visual artists; War; Writers
• ISSN: 2151-4364; 2151-4372; 2151-4372
• DOI: 10.1353/hum.2017.0004

In the aftermath of 9/11, the American government launched the war on terror in order to impose the prosecution of its foreign policy. From the onset, the war on terrors powerful visual and verbal narratives made it almost impossible to oppose its rationale and to suggest alternative framings. Over the years, lawyers, human rights investigators, journalists, and a very few congressmen have challenged its imposition, shedding a crucial and painful light on the elaboration and deployment of the war over time. Due to the rise and salience of the torture issue in American politics, the United States military detention and interrogation operation, Joint Task Force (JTF) Guantanamo, which was established in January 2002 to house terrorism suspects of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, has received particular attention by those wanting to document the evolving construction of these interpretative frames of intertwining verbal and visual images. Drawing on transcripts of congressional hearings, Jared Del Rosso has recently shown the shifting framing of political discourses on Guantanamo. Along with media reports, in 2004 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) publicly released emails documenting FBI agents experiences. This exposure began to force the administration to acknowledge that Abu Ghraib was not an isolated case occurring in some remote fields of war but that the use of torture was also widespread on American soil, transforming Guantanamo from model prison to a global stain. Del Rosso highlights how the government began to reframe the situation in order to deny torture.3 Delineating a visual narration of this shift, Rebecca A. Adelman and Elspeth Van Veeren have examined the pictorial shadow of the facility by analyzing successive sets of pictures authorized and released by the Department of Defense. They stress the transition from the selective dissemination of rarefied and secretive images to the construction of a telegenic spectacle equipped with media and VIP tours devised to promote the facilities as safe, humane, legal, and transparent amid increasing reports of widespread torture and violence unleashed on faceless and nameless detainees. To begin to understand these issues, this dossier gathers together a dialogue between the photographer Debi Cornwall and the human rights activist Larry Siems, with a portfolio of Cornwall's photographs.