The Steward Of Pottery Barn
For Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as for the Iraqi dignitaries who had gathered here, it was a symbolic moment: a ceremony on a bluff high above the Tigris River at which the Americans formally returned the largest of Saddam Hussein's palace complexes to Iraqi sovereign control, 31 months after invading...
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Who's Flexing The Muscle
In most every MSM story on Iraq, it seems the media goes out of its way not to pull back the curtain on American control over the government. That's why this article on Friday (Torture Charges Deepen Rift Between U.S. and Iraqi Leader-link) was particularly interesting.
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Losing Face: An Update On Guantanamo
I doubt one could find a better image to symbolize the legal and political netherworld we’ve created at Gitmo. And, with the news this week of the existence of secret American detention centers scattered throughout the world (link), the metaphor only get richer. (The false note, of course, is...
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Vested Interest
I first saw the images of the Amman suicide bomber described as a "fashion show" on a right wing blog. Then, the Washington Post story on Tuesday described Sajida al-Rishawi as "modeling" the suicide vest. Like many others, my first reaction was: How could this woman still be wearing...
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The "See Through" Administration
Cheney is someone who is simultaneously so slick and so arrogant, one part of him operates with complete deniability while another part operates in open defiance. That’s why I think this shot — of Ahmad Chalabi leaving the State Department after meeting with Rice on Wednesday — is the...
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Boots Off The Ground
How much of an impression is the U.S. military really making on the situation in Iraq? According to an innocuous story this week inside the L.A. Times (Troops Have a Nervous Ride to Nighttime Raid – link), hidden bombs in Iraq have become so abundant and powerful, the military...
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Beyond Dover: MSM's First Published U.S. War Fatality?
(click image for larger version) In the course of commenting yesterday on the use of military photos to accompany U.S. press accounts of the Iraq war (Pentagon Pictures, Tall Afar Tales – link), I mentioned how the NYT was one of the few news entities with photographers in Husayba...
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Pentagon Pictures, Tall Afar Tales
Something bothering me lately is the recent practice by the LA Times to accompany news stories from Iraq with photos taken by the American military.
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One Picture Is Worth A Thousand Lashes
If might sound like a throughly ignorant question, but a lot of people have been wondering why Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad drew world-wide attention last week for saying that Israel "must be wiped off the map." The statement was delivered in a keynote speech to a so-called “World Without...
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The New Republic Licks Judy Miller's Boots?
If I’ve discovered anything from running this site, it’s that photo analysis is not to be taken lightly. (The other thing I’ve learned is that there is never a shortage of people who know an awful lot more about a picture than you do.) That said, I wonder what...
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A View Of The Square
Reading the NYT front page story yesterday about the car bombings in Baghdad at the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, I just didn’t imagine it that large. It wasn’t until I saw the pictures that the scale really came home to me. In the article, however, The Times also made...
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The Saddam Show
Visually, the coverage of Saddam Hussein’s day in court was interesting from a number of angles. (First off, however, I have to get your take on the "enclosure" that contained Hussein and his codefendants. I know I have a number of readers in the Middle East, so perhaps someone...
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Portrait of Evil Vs. Evil Portrait
I’m no apologist for Saddam Hussein. At the same time, I cannot fail to give credit for the brilliant timing involved in flooding the news space with the sudden drum-beat of anti-Saddam hysteria. My respects to the BushCo. managers as well as Iraqi insiders for so quickly changing the...
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Extreme Home Make Over: Iraq Edition
On Saturday, I took notice of a couple images revealing a heavier U.S. military hand in the Iraqi elections than we’ve been led to believe. In retrospect, what surprised me most about these images was they existed at all. It’s been a little surreal combing through the newswires in...
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From the Archive (Oct '05): Exit The Green Zone
Okay, so this post was 4 1/2 years too early, the Americans only exiting the Green Zone today. ********* Let’s go back to mid-August. The U.S. had imposed a deadline of August 15th for Iraqi legislators/power brokers to come up with a constitution. At the same time, Condi Rice...
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Practically Obvious
After London authorities discovered that that the July 7th bombers had cased the underground two weeks prior to their actual attack, you would think this was the only picture made available to the media. Not true. Video and stills revealed three of the four perpetrators in various places and...
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Unleashing Hell Ironically
The other day, while thinking about the National Guard’s Katrina deployment, I started fantasizing about what other socially worthwhile military applications might possibly be achieved with my tax dollar. And then I woke up. One thing I learned from Abu Ghraib is that, if we didn’t occasionally receive direct...
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This Year's Fallujah
With Katrina having drowned out most other news in September, I thought it was worth taking a look back at two iconic images. The TIME cover is from September 26th issue, but the photo itself was taken on or around September 2nd, during a military offensive in Tall ‘Afar. ...
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