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June 13, 2007

TERRORISTS...OR PHOTOGENIC "PARTISANS"?

We know the routine by now. GI's are abducted in Iraq by insurgents. There is a concerted search for the missing. The abductors release a video showing the captured, or their forced confessions. The Pentagon and various experts claim the footage to be authentic. The outrage follows. The hostages are quietly exchanged or released or, as is too often the case, they are killed, sometimes by beheading. In rare cases, they are freed or they escape. Then the cycle begins anew.

This time, however, the tape was of a less brutal and yet equally ominous nature.

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The video, made available last week, revolved around three Americans adbucted in May, all of whom are now dead, according to a communique issued yesterday by the militants. But unlike the previous clips, which are often quite gruesome, and full of stolen, crude, and disjointed moments, this one has a propagandist's touch.

Perhaps the best examination of this new style of insurgent video comes from Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post (whose sage words--about Osama bin Laden's use of videography--I cite in Watching the World Change, page 178). In last week's Post, Kennicott observed:

"Like another video that is circulating (showing a series of brash attacks on American vehicles by men throwing devastating grenades), the new piece focuses on what might be called fighters in repose. Recurring throughout both videos are scenes of insurgent forces underneath a canopy of trees. In the newest, there is a man standing over a handful of fighters crouched beneath a tree. With the antenna of his satellite phone or walkie-talkie, he points to a detailed map that seems to be hanging in the branches that surround him.

"The scene throws into confusion the deeply ingrained, unconscious sense that terrorism is an urban phenomenon. By moving some of the most lengthy passages of the video into the outdoors -- a particularly inviting, peaceful place -- the video attempts to undermine the notion that what is happening is a terrorist attack. These fighters look more like what we would call partisans, part of a long tradition of men who have taken to the hills, or the forests, or the jungles, to fight an alien enemy.

"Partisans, in the literature of war, are connected with the land, which gives them authenticity. They may be on the run, but their lives have been refined to a more simple existence, apart from the comforts and corruption of the organized enemy. Hemingway's vision of the Spanish Civil War was in part an idyll of resistance, as were many Soviet novels of the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, which became patriotic pastorals, celebrating the close-to-the-land status and integrity of Bolshevik heroes….

"And then [comes] a stunning bit of montage: President Bush is seen directing an orchestra, waving his arms a bit awkwardly, more like a drum major than a conductor (images taken from a presidential visit to Jamestown last month). The intercutting is a devastating bit of message tailoring...

"After scenes of occupation and Bush as bandleader, after the fighters in the forest poring over plans, comes the attack, a crudely shot nocturnal scene in which the death and devastation happen in an almost abstract play of grainy black-and-white images. The pure terror of beheading videos or the nauseating voyeurism of sniper videos that have littered the Internet is replaced by attack footage that follows the same, almost prim code of decorum that the U.S. media use when showing war imagery.

"Perhaps if they had more gruesome video, they would have used it. But the effect is to dilute the moral outrage of violence and focus the attention on the more palatable before-and-after scenes. It is a canny bit of editing."

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"The final images," Kennicott concludes, "the ones that will haunt Americans because they show two young men who are at best in grave peril, and quite possibly dead, play more than a forensic or trophy function in the context of the whole video. American soldiers are identified by money, credit cards and a cross. The bar codes -- so objectifying and so industrial -- on their military identification cards stand in stark contrast to the masked fighters seen earlier. This is the final iteration of the attacker as corrupt (materialist, living on credit) or alien (Christian)."

The "forest idyll" aspect of the footage brings to mind of one of the tapes released by bin Laden, who, as a man on the lam cannot show his face in public and has literally become his video and audio manifestations. Here is how I describe that 2003 tape in the book, with an ample assist from Kennicott:

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SCREEN GRAB FROM AL-JAZEERA

"Bin Laden and his acolytes continued to disseminate dollops of video and audio during the five years after 9/11. On the attacks' second anniversary, al-Jazeera showed a clip depicting bin Laden [on] a mountainside, prophetlike, walking stick [at his side]. Wrote Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post, '...Mountains aren't just a place one retreats to, but a place of refuge, a place closer to God.... Perhaps that's the intention. He is not on the run, he's out for a walk. He's not in a cave, but on top of the world.

" 'It's as if someone on his video production team...has channeled the spirit of the old Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl...straight from the annals of German romanticism: Show the old warrior looking like a young poet communing with nature.... The tape shows not just that he's alive, but that he's alive and in a better place. If you were carefully controlling your own mythology, this is precisely the kind of tape that would be inspiring right now. Osama in the clouds."

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