lynch parties in Iraq revive American tradition

"race" trumps all once again

Luc Sante writes in the NYTimes today that he had trouble recalling any American precedent for the prison photos we have seen come out of Iraq this month, until he remembered similar triumphal faces and gestures in photographs taken in the first half of the last century.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something. There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance, that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of lynchings.

Note: Up to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested "by mistake," according to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report.

[late 1930's Indiana image from Do or Die]