on my lai:



taken by army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle

connections b/w this work finding its way into the public discourse, and the abu gharib in the same manner, with the congress and the like--

did the discourses have a matching pattern?

California State University, Channel Islands:

The Army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, assigned to Charlie Company on March 16th, 1968 had two cameras. One was an Army standard; one was his personal camera. The film on the Army owned camera, i.e., the official camera of the State, showed standard operations ­ that is, 'authorized' and 'official' operations including interrogating villagers and burning 'insurgent' huts. What the film on the personal camera showed, however, was different. When turned over to the press and Government by the photographer, those 'unofficial' photographs provided the grounds for a court martial. Haeberle's personal images (owned by himself and not the US Government) showed hundreds of villagers who had been killed by U.S. troops. More significantly, they showed that the dead were primarily women and children, including infants. These photographs exposed the fact that the 'insurgents' in popular discourse about Vietnam were actually unarmed civilians. The photos made visible to viewers that the 'enemy' in Vietnam was actually the indigenous Vietnamese population.

Camilla Benolirao Griggers, qouted on wiki... and a book called visulazing war, which i cant seem to find online (they are also owned by the us government, as opposed to the abu gharib fotos which seem to be owned by whom?)

two more images, less popularized, including one of a mother and a child, with open wounds)

Haberlee's photos were published by Life Magazine and now have the AP Slug after life magazine

when did the AP Slug appear, and when did the pentagon slug disappear?

Testimony of Ronald Haeberle, as archived by the University of Missouri at Kansas City:
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_thabe.htm

Excerpts:
Q: Then you did not see Lieutenant Calley?

A: I did not see Lieutenant Calley.

Q: Do you not have a definite interest in the outcome of the suit?

A: Yes, sir, I do have an interest in it.

Q: And isn't that interest in selling books and magazine articles?

A: No, sir.

Q: Then what is your interest?

A: In seeing a fair trial.

Q: Did you not make the following statement to him: that you wished you'd waited until after the court-martial to sell the pictures because you would have made more money?

A: No, sir, I did not.
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Q: From the time you took those pictures until after you got back to the United States, no one had been told of the color film, is that right? Did you ever tell any officer about what you'd seen?

A: I can't specifically recall. Jay and I talked about it. But I can't specifically recall.

Q: You never told anyone in the chain of command about the atrocity and massacre?

A: No, sir.

Q: Weren't you shocked at what you'd seen? Weren't you upset by what you'd seen? Why didn't you report it?

A: I felt it was unusual but I wasn't the one to bring it up. We decided to keep quiet until someone came to us and not to start the ball rolling. . .
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Q: Did you ever consider the impact of your failure to disclose that you had these pictures or information to your commander or senior commanders?

A: No, sir, I did not.

Q: You had no feeling that failure to disclose that information was a dereliction of duty?

A: I've heard that.
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the question then comes down to, is reportage enough, and then of course the difference is that RH claims that it was for news and not glory that he was shooting film

(also note the helicopter that stopped the slaughter, and ron ridenhour, who helped stop the practices, by writing to his congressman, entirely by gossip and 2nd hand information--compare the writing, with stamps and ink, and army censors, vs the emailing and message boards, of the digital age.)


research this


Seymour Hersh's work on My Lai, and his consitency on the left thru out that, onto and including Abu Gharib

Perhaps the most compelling and memorable anti war poster of the weitnam era is Q:And Babies A: and Babies based on a photograph of the my lai massacre taken by the army combat photographer Ron Habarale. the words superimpsoed over this image are from an interveiw with my lai partcipant who had killed dozens of vietemese citizens. The art workers collation, an anti war activist group, decidedthat the poster...shold be widely distrubtedto counter news reports that generally folllowed the US Miltary's offical line. In Nov. 1969 AWV members met wtih reps of the Musuem of Modern Art in New York (who distrubuted it)... Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond Peter Selz, 46

questions:
1) wallace, and other media interviews, with england and company, bidding wars, etc
2) how could the pictures be both published in life magazine, one of the sqaurest in the country, and be interviewd by wallace adn still claim to be ignored
3) abu gharib, the response of the art world, the iRaq posters, the meme of liddy englands hand gesture as meaningless gesture, the toxic irony and the baldness of the work (though National Lampoon doing McCally as Alfred Newman, is as ironic as the iRaq poster)
4) who and when did wallace interview, and for what publication

The two other iconic photos, of napalmed babies, and the execution, were done in 1968 by Nicki Ut and Eddie Adams resepctivley

(i want to talk, i think, about the soilders in teh background, helmeted, and gaurded, an the political implications of being stripped, but i dont think it fits with the article)

about Nicki Ut:
From Teh Amherst Magazine, article, The Pain of War, from Amherst College:

Now, 30 years or so later, another war, in another place, fought in ways and on terms I would not have chosen, provides one context for revisiting those memories and that imagining. Yet today, it is the disoriented looks on the faces of the children in the right of the photograph and the anguish of the boy on the left rather than the screaming child at the center that first catches my attention. What was in their thoughts? What sense could they make of the violence around them?

Austin D. Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science


From the same article, a photo by Kenneth Jareke

the burning then, is the same, and it combines a sort of stalwart soilder stance, with the horror of being burnt alive, and it seems to be a crossbreeding of those two images--or of the nazis and the jews, even--of being burnt and doing the burning in one image...

this was one of the most explicit images that emerged from the first gulf war, and its scarity, its lack of public utility, does something to the surity of baudillards essay, in teh same way as the atari green missles destroying baghdad do something to gird it