Sacred Gestures: Images From Our Holy War

By Mitchell, W J T

Much has been written about the political significance of the Abu Ghraib photographs, their scandalous and undeniable revelation that the American war on terror has involved a widespread use of torture. Commentators Mark Danner, Seymour Hersh, and Susan Sontag immediately argued that the images were only the tip of an iceberg, symptoms of a much larger and systematic problem than a “few bad apples” among the United States soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.1 Innumerable opinion pieces have been written arguing for the linkage of these images to the publicly declared contempt of the administration of President George W. Bush for international law and the Geneva Convention, not to mention American criminal and military law. Their iconography has been linked to everything from Internet pornography to American lynching photographs, to longstanding conditions inside the American prison system.2 But no one, so far, has given any sustained attention to the central icon that has emerged from the repertoire of Abu Ghraib photographs and established itself as the emblem of this entire episode. I am speaking, of course, of the now-famous figure of the “Man on the Box,” the “Hooded Man,” or (as he is sarcastically referred to inside Iraq) the “Statue of Liberty.” (This latter name is based on a widely circulated image of a Baghdad mural in which the Man on the Box appears next to a figure of the Statue of Liberty wearing the white hood and robe of the Ku Klux Klan and reaching up, not to the torch of Liberty, but to an electrical switch connected to the wires leading to the Iraqi’s hands and genitals.) This figure has now become instantly recognizable throughout the world, appearing as the central image in news reports, political protests, and cartoon strips such as the “Bionic Abu Ghraib Man,” which depicts him as a “transformer” who turns into a guided missile. The variety of artistic and nonartistic transmutations and reframings might best be summarized by Forkscrew Graphics’ witty silkscreen posters that insert the “iRaqi” man into the array of self-absorbed dancing figures advertising the iPod. It is as if the Abu Ghraib Man has become as familiar as any globally circulated corporate icon, comparable with the Nike Swoosh or McDonald’s Golden Arches. The pleasure-seeking narcissism of the iPod dancers is mirrored (in reverse) by the self-absorbed pathos of the torture victim.3

I want to ask why this image became the icon for the entire Abu Ghraib scandal, and further, how it has acquired an iconographic resonance that goes beyond this immediate event to touch on the deepest and widest meanings of the contemporary world-system. I am arguing, in short, that this image of the Abu Ghraib Man is a kind of “world picture” in several senses of the phrase. First, as a globally circulated and instantly recognizable icon that requires only minimal cues, visual or verbal, to be called to mind; second, as a symbol of a global conflict that is not confined to the present moment of the early twenty-first century but resonates deeply within a long history of figures of power and abjection in the repertoire of Christian iconography; and third, as a symptom of a new world order of image-production and circulation made possible by digital technologies-what I want to call an era of “cloning,” which has the potential to accelerate the reproduction of images and to endow them with an almost virus-like vitality. The fact that the image evokes medieval and Renaissance depictions of the human body (and Christ’s body in particular) as an imago mundi or microcosm, of the world helps to reinforce the uncanny sense that this image was already, in some sense, quite familiar, even at the first moment of its appearance in April 2003.

As a guide to thinking about the historical evolution of Christian iconography from Old Testament sources to its adaptation in the early Christian world through the Crusades, the great art historian Meyer Schapiro provides an ideal methodological primer for reflection on this image and its many clones and mutations.4 Writing in the early 1960s as an effort to reflect on the evolution of images within a semiotic framework that would respect both the textual sources and the pictorial repertoires that give images their meaning, it is hard to imagine that Schapiro could have predicted an age like ours, when the world is in the grip of a global religious revival and the holy wars that inevitably follow. Schapiro wrote his essay at a time when the main religious issues on the horizon were the fresh memories of fascist paganism and communist atheism, not a global Christian crusade.5 But perhaps the calm, detached tone of Schapiro’s effort to understand the relations of Jewish and Christian icons, and especially the genealogy that links the figure of a victorious Moses to a crucified Christ, may serve us now to gain some perspective on a set of images that are difficult to look on without shame and outrage.

Schapiro’s essay on “Words and Pictures” was built upon a series of relationships that are foundational to the interpretation of images. The first is the relation of an image to a text that it illustrates, and, closely connected with this, the relation of “literal” and “symbolic” meanings in both image and text. The second is the formal distinction between frontal and profile renderings of the human figure, and their association with the implied “address” of the image as an “I” facing the spectator as a “you,” or what the linguist mile Benveniste called “first person” and “third person” addresses of a picture. The third is his distinction (grounded in the formal difference between profile and frontal views) between “themes of state” and “themes of action”-that is, between images that confront the viewer directly with a static, frontally posed figure, and a self-contained action seen beyond the picture plane, a contrast strangely reminiscent of Michael Fried’s distinction between images of theatricality and absorption.

Schapiro analyzes the way the figure of Moses raising his arms at the battle of the Israelites with the Amalekites is absorbed, retrospectively, into Christian iconography as a “prefiguration” of Christ crucified, which in turn becomes the prototype for gestures of both sacred and secular sovereignty thoughout Christendom, including the gesture of the priest celebrating mass, or the monarch addressing his subjects. Here is Schapiro quoting the twelfth- century Pope Honorius II, on the multiple valences of the figure with the outstretched arms:

In it are represented the sacrifice of the highest pontiff (sc. Christ) and the battle of the King of Glory. Moses prefigured it when he prayed on the mountain with outstretched hands, while Joshua, who is Jesus, fought with Amalek, devastated the kingdom of the defeated enemy, and brought back his people joyous in victory. Thus Christ on the mount of the Cross prayed with outstretched hands for the unbelieving and denying people and, as a victorious leader… Fought under the standard of the Cross against Amalek, that is the devil, and laid waste his conquered kingdom; having defeated the evil enemy, the Lord despoiled Hell.6

Schapiro notes the many different kinds of images that are condensed into the figure with the outstretched arms, from the portrayal of Moses with his arms supported by Aaron and Hur, to “orants” or “oratorical” praying figures of the catacombs, to Daniel in the Lion’s Den, to pagan figures of deities with their arms outstretched, sometimes supported by their ministers, sometimes alone and unsupported, all the way down to the depiction of Christian sovereigns such as Henry Q of England, whose images display:

The same analogy of the king to Christ through his posture as a cross and to Moses through the supporting bishop-saints…. The role of Moses is ascribed at one point to the ruler and at another to the priest. Both are at the same time religious and secular powers in close alliance with each other…7

It should be clear from this analysis that Schapiro regards the “theme of state” as not merely a formal matter of figural “stasis” and frontality in the address of the image but as a key resource for the representation of religious and political sovereignty. It also seems clear that Schapiro’s way of moving from the literal to the symbolic meaning of these themes of state is cumulative and historically reversible. Later versions of an image “remember” earlier versions, recuperating and transforming them at the same time, so that the figures of Aaron and Hur, the “supporting” ministers of Moses, can disappear from the scene in order to stress the absolutely independent power of the sovereign, as in the famous figure in the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), where the hands of the monarch control the sword of secular violence and the shepherd’s crook of religious, pastoral “care for the safety” of the people.

But equally important is the reverse historical reading that looks back to the representation of Moses as a prefiguration of Christ, and attributes the victory over the Amalekites to the divine power of the Christological gesture. It is not only that symbolic meanings accumulate as an image moves forward in history, but that its new meanings have the effect of refraining the past and rendering temporality and narrative a\s a simultaneous tableau. The “theme of state” renders history itself as an eternal, static image that is unchanging in its basic form, even as its full meaning is unfolded in new images “to come” in a promised apocalyptic future when the Messiah will return to earth in triumph. Moses’s victory over the Amalekites does not only prefigure the first coming of Christ to offer himself as a sacrifice, but also his second coming as the conquering sovereign of the Last Judgment. One would be hard- pressed to find a more powerful example of what Walter Benjamin called the “dialectical image” that captures “history at a standstill.” Paul Klee’s Angelas Noiws (1920), which Benjamin regularly evokes, is of course a frontally posed, arms-spread “theme of state” in its own right.

Perhaps it is now becoming clear why the figure of the Hooded Man became the universally recognizable icon of the entire Abu Ghraib scandal. At the formal level, this frontally posed figure, like the figures of prayer Schapiro invokes, faces the viewer directly, hailing the viewer as the “you” who is addressed by an “I.” The static character of the “theme of state” is reinforced further by its positioning on a pedestal, which makes it clear that “action” or movement is precluded, that absolute stillness was required to maintain this position. The stasis of the image is further reinforced by its symmetry and contrastive color scheme. It makes a simple and singular impression as a black, diamond-shaped form against a light background, a form that can be instantly recognized from a distance, and copied in a schematic silhouette without any need for further details. The hood covering the face renders the figure even more abstract and anonymous. It could be any Iraqi, or, for that matter, any suspected terrorist captured by the U.S. military. The true identity of the Man on the Box is, at this writing, still unsettled. He was first identified mNcwswuk, July 19, 2004, as Satar Jabar, a carjacking suspect. In the winter of 2006, however, several sources, including the New York Times, claimed that he was a former Baath Party official named AIi Shalal Qaissi. According to Die Presse, a self-described “independent centrist daily” in Germany, Qaissi was “a secret service henchman of Saddam Hussein,” a political criminal who richly deserved the treatment he received.”

The question of who the Man on the Box was, like die question of the identity of the “real historical Jesus,” may remain contested for some time to come. What cannot be contested is the iconic character of the image, the way its anonymity, ambiguity, and formal simplicity give it, like the image of Jesus “proper,” a life of its own that acquires new dimensions of meaning in every new context that it encounters. Among the many images that emerged from the Abu Ghraib scandal, it stands out as the only one that conforms to Schapiro’s concept of the “theme of state.” By contrast most of the other photographs are formally complex, even chaotic, images of action, in which bodies and forms are tangled together, or blurred into the background.

A second reason for the power of the image is that, despite its context in scenes of horror and scandal, it has a curious modesty and dignity. The figure of the hooded Iraqi is not naked. He is not contorted into a “stress position,” humiliated by having his nakedness photographed, or forced to crawl on all fours, leashed like an animal. He is not smeared in excrement or stacked in a chaotic mass of naked indistinguishable bodies, or forced to simulate a sexual act. He is not a decomposing corpse packed in ice. Although the hood renders him anonymous, he appears as a singular figure elevated on a pedestal, an image of dignity and poise that becomes even more remarkable when one reflects on what we know about the event being captured by this photograph. The most elementary way of doing this is to project yourself into the situation depicted. Imagine yourself balancing precariously atop a cardboard C-ration box, with electrical wires attached to your fingers and genitals, stifled and blinded by a hood.9 You have already been tortured with electrical shocks to sensitive areas of your body, and you have been told by your torturers that if you fall off the box, you will be electrocuted. In the context of uncounted days of sleep deprivation, beatings, and cries of pain from your fellow prisoners, it would be something of a miracle to remain balanced on top of this box for even a minute. And yet you do this long enough to be photographed, and thus are transformed into an image that will maintain this pose, this composure, as long as the image continues to exist.

But what are we to make of the obvious resemblance of this image to representations of Christ with his arms raised, either at the Crucifixion or the resurrection, or in scenes of prayer and blessing? I say that this is obvious, and yet it is important to acknowledge that the resemblance to any particular image of Christ is imperfect, and there will be considerable resistance, even outrage, at such a suggestion. For one thing, it seems wildly implausible to suggest that this photograph was meant to recall the figure of Christ. If there is some resemblance, it is surely accidental, and quite incidental to the real meaning of the image, which (as Schapiro would insist) must be sought in the concrete circumstances of its production, the literal texts and contexts that surround it.10 For those who care about the political meaning of this image, its resemblance to images of Christ may seem to be a distraction from its real, literal meaning, an aestheticizing of a historical document. For those who care deeply about the image of Christ, it may be deeply repugnant to think that this photograph of an Iraqi prisoner, who was a possible terrorist suspect in a war zone at the time, and at best a car thief captured in a military sweep, should be associated with the Prince of Peace, the Son of God, the King of Kings. The resemblance to images of the Crucifixion, moreover, is rather tenuous. The crucified Christ stretches his arms upward, not downward. Christ is naked except for a loin cloth, he does not wear a cloak. His face is visible, and crowned with thorns rather than hooded. He is suspended from a cross, not standing on a pedestal. He has nails in his hands, not wires attached to them.

These contrasts were captured vividly in a photomontage overlaying a Crucifixion scene on the Abu Ghraib man that was created by the Chicago Tribune to illustrate an op-ed piece that this writer contributed in June 2004 after the photographs came to light. However, this montage revealed the stark difference between the two figures while reinforcing the impression of, if not resemblance, at least resonance between them. The question is: what sort of resonance and how can we talk about it? How can we get at the precise meaning of this image in a way that respects its pictorial as well as its historical and political specificity, while reckoning with its circulation in a world of images, and its numerous reframings and mutations? To call the Man on the Box a “Christ-figure” is perhaps simply to give in to an iconographie clich, unless we take the trouble to analyze more deeply the other levels of resonance contained in the image. What would it really mean to see this image “as” Christ, as opposed to all the other modes of “seeing as” that could be brought to the image?

The answer lies in a deeper reflection on Schapiro’s distinction between themes of “state” and “action.” There is a related distinction that focuses, not on the formal character of the image, but the state of mind of the beholder, and that is the contrast between devotional and narrative readings of sacred images.” A narrative reading of the Hooded Man provides a date and a proper name to the figure, and a provenance of the photograph itself, from its production in Abu Ghraib prison sometime in the fall of 2003, to its public release in the spring of 2004 and the subsequent scandal. It reads this against its formal grain as an image of action. A devotional reading is contemplative and empathie, slowing down the time of the image to a kind of stasis that mirrors the bodily state of the figure in the mental state of the beholder. It puts the viewer in the position of the figure, a process that is encouraged by the frontality of the theme of state, in its (paradoxically blind) “face to face” encounter with the beholder.12 This is a “seeing as” that does not assume dial the image is exhausted by its narrative reading but asks what it means to live with the image and the world it depicts, to ask what it wants from us.

Perhaps the first thing the picture demands from the devoted viewer-particularly a U.S. citizen-is an acknowledgment of responsibility. To put it in the crudest terms, this photograph and what it reveals was paid for by our tax dollars. We “own” it, and must “own up” to what it tells us about ourselves. Even if we opposed the Bush regime and its war in Iraq, we are responsible for this image. Thomas Mann’s clear opposition to Hitler’s regime did not, in his view, excuse him from a sense of responsibility and guilt as a citizen of the German nation. This is an image of state in the most precise sense: an image of state-sponsored torture, the state to which we belong as citizens. Just as the Romans crucified Jesus as an “enemy of the state,” a political dissident who was accused of assuming a false position of sovereignty as “king of the Jews,” the Hooded Man was accused of being an enemy of the state. seen as an accused terrorist, he is not a mere criminal, but a political adversary who represents a rival claim to sovereignty.’1 Terror and torture are, in fact, the twin images of the “state of exception” that grounds political sovereignty in post-Hobbesian political theory: the sovereign, as Carl Schmitt puts it, “is he who deci\des on the exception,” and the exception is both the “state of emergency,” and the exception to the rule of law that the sovereign claims in the time of emergency. ‘* The whole purpose of the “war on terror” is to claim exceptional, indeed unlimited, powers for the sovereign to determine exceptions to the rule of law. Torture is thus a justified exception to both American and international law since, by definition, it is used only against (suspected) terrorists. And the terrorist is not just the enemy of the law but of the sovereign himself; he is the necessary counterpart to and antitype of the sovereign, claiming for himself an exceptional status that mirrors the role of the sovereign.”

That is why the iconic tableau that unfolds in the Passion of the Christ takes the form it does, as a mock coronation. Jesus must be humiliated and tortured, of course, but not in just any manner. It must be a spectacle that simultaneously “raises him up” as a crowned sovereign and “brings him down” to the level of a common thief.16 The fact that the Abu Ghraib torturers mistook a car thief for a terrorist makes the political meaning of this image a kind of obscene parody of the Passion, an obscenity that does not affect the dignity of the image, however, but the moral status of its producers. This is an image of our moral and political state, of the United States, at this time.

A devotional reading of the Hooded Man also has to take note of the way the picture evokes other images from the Passion cycle, not just the Crucifixion. The only sense in which the Crucifixion bears on the image, in fact, is in its putative narrative location as the figure of a tortured criminal on the verge of execution, in this case by the modern (and almost uniquely American) technology of electrocution, not the archaic ritual of crucifixion. But the specific posture of the Hooded Man and his elevation on a pedestal connect him to other episodes of the Passion, and beyond that, to other images of Christ. The downward slant of the arms links him with images of Christ performing gestures of welcome, beckoning, surrender, and descent, as opposed to the upward gestures associated, for instance, with the Crucifixion, the Transfiguration, and the ascent into heaven. There is a contrast as well with the Mosaic figure with supported arms exerting military force with his raised arms. Thus, we find exactly this downward arm position in representations of Christ descending into Hell where the downward gesture is pulling up Adam and Eve out of their graves, or the Sermon on the Mount with its welcoming vulnerability, or in the so- called “Man of Sorrows” or “Lamentation,” a non-narrative image that represents Jesus after the Crucifixion but before the Entombment (his bathed body as in Fra Angelico’s treatment of this theme), seemingly on the borderline between death and life, crucifixion and resurrection. The pedestal links the figure to images of the Transfiguration or to the mock coronation of the Ecce Homo, when Jesus is displayed to the crowd from an elevated position, crowned with thorns. Finally, the hood firmly identifies the figure with scenes of the mocking of Christ, where he is generally portrayed with a blindfold, as in the renderings of Matthias Grunewald and Angelico.

Of course, one can object that all this religious iconography is simply beside the point for a modern digital photograph that was produced by some American soldiers in the context of a secular war. But to raise this objection is immediately to be reminded that the war on terror has been declared by a pious Christian American sovereign to be a “crusade” against evil, a holy war that makes sense to many Christian (and Jewish) fundamentalists as the millennial struggle that will lead directly into the Apocalypse and the arrival of the Messiah. General William Boykin, undersecretary of defense, has publicly declared that the war on terror is a war against the idolatrous, evil religion of Islam.17 Needless to say, this is not official policy, and Bush quickly abandoned the term “crusade” as an impolitic choice of words. But then the entire archive of Abu Ghraib photographs, along with the cascade of reports of a global American Gulag of torture that stretches from Guantanamo Bay to Eastern Europe to Afghanistan, has also been disavowed. “We do not torture,” affirms the President. And we certainly do not torture in a way that involves restaging the Passion of the Christ.

Or do we? Other images from Abu Ghraib such as the figure of the excrement-smeared Iraqi forced to assume a classic cruciform posture with his legs crossed, or a naked Iraqi led (like Jesus) on a leash make one wonder whether some kind of obscene Passion Play was being orchestrated by the still unidentified military intelligence personnel and independent contractors outside the view of the camera. Sabrina Harmon, one of the low-level soldiers convicted of misconduct in the Abu Ghraib scandal, noted in a letter to a friend that a detained taxicab driver “handcuffed backwards to his window naked with his underwear over his head and face… looked like Jesus Christ At first I had to laugh, so I went and grabed (sic) the camera and took a picture.’”" The “few bad apples” who have taken the blame for these “abuses” were, by and large, nice young Christians from small town backgrounds who almost surely have never seen or heard of Angelico. They might, however, have seen MeI Gibson’s film The Passion of the Omst (2004), which was released at the very time the Abu Ghraib images were made public. Did they notice the resemblance between Gibson’s portrayal of the pleasure and glee that the Roman soldiers take in torture and their own grinning faces mocking their Iraqi victims? Did they ask themselves what has become of Christianity in a time when its major cinematic expression completely eliminates its positive message in favor of an obsessive concentration on the minute details of the tortured human body, from beatings, to a scourging that literally flays the flesh from the victim, to agonizingly slow death by that “stress position” known as crucifixion? Did they notice that Arabs and Muslims have now assumed the position of the sacrificial victims in a Christian crusade against evil?

Whatever the intendons of the hands-on (as opposed to systemic) producers of the Abu Ghraib images, their effect is not only to produce an updating of Judeo-Christian iconography but to reopen the question of what the Christological fusion of images of the torture victim as conquering sovereign meant in the first place. The figure of Moses, his outstretched arms supported by Aaron and Hur, inspiring his armies against the Amalekites, is an image of a ruthless conquering power. We might recall here that Schapiro’s citation from Honorius stresses the devastation wrought upon “the kingdom of the defeated enemy.” Amalek is the devil, and the victorious Christian prince “laid waste his conquered kingdom.’”9 Small wonder that some Muslims suspect that they might be playing the role of modern Amalekites to the conquering armies of a Judeo- Christian coalition and that the “laying waste” of Iraq might be something more than mere incompetence.

Perhaps now we are in a position to explain the uncanny power of the image of the Hooded Man. As an exemplar of Schapiro’s “theme of state,” it captures the contemporary convergence of secular and sacred power in the holy war on terror. But it does so, not simply by reinforcing the Manichean scenario in the typological identification of Christ with Moses but by exposing what Benjamin would have seen as the dialectical resources of this image, displaying “history at a standstill.” The Hooded Man exacerbates the contradictions embedded in the theme of state by figuring it as an icon that does not remain securely on the positive side of the sacred-secular confusion (e.g., Christian democracy and enlightenment vs Muslim tyranny and idolatry) but forces an cnjambment of good and evil, god and the devil. That is why the identity of the image shuttles between sovereignty and abjection, terror suspect and torture victim, criminal and martyr, and why the image itself seems to vacillate between political potency and powerlessness. It also positions the American spectator as caught between two incompatible positions: in a state of empathy with the tortured victim, or as accomplice of the leering torturers. The shaming, which was the avowed motive of photographing these scenes in the first place, comes back redoubled to haunt the photographer, the spectator, and the state of the union and the world that he represents. No wonder Bush remarked that nobody wants to see images like this.

This brings us to Schapiro’s final horizon in the interpretation of iconographie themes of state, namely, the “norms of representation” that constrain the appearance of the image. The typological condensation of Moses, Jesus, the Priest, and the Sovereign in Judo-Christian “themes of state” passed through not only changes of style but different forms of mediation, from paintings hidden in catacombs, to impressive mosaics in public places, to oil painting, and the choreographed rituals of the Mass and political spectacle. Now the latest avatar of this image has metastasized in a new medium: the digital photograph and its global circulation on the Internet. Containment and control of the meaning of this image is no longer conceivable. A new logic of reproduction and circulation has overtaken the domain of images, rendering them infinitely reproducible and mutable at the same time. I have discussed this elsewhere as a form of “cloning” that accelerates both the duplication and the mutation of images, replacing the old law of typological prefiguration in which a unique “ancestral” image (Moses at the battle of the Amalekites) gives rise to an equally unique “descendant” image Jesus on the Cross). The new law of imag\es in the age of biocybernetic reproduction is one that fuses mass uniformity and rapid evolutionary variation, the simultaneous appearance of typological “prefigurations” and “postfigurations” as uncanny doubles and evil twins, themes of state that confuse democracy and tyranny, order and anarchy, terrorism and torture. Perhaps the Hooded Man would, as Hans Haacke has suggested, be the appropriate figure to deliver the next “State of the Union” address, as long as we replace the Hood with the American flag.20 Could it be that the second Coming has already occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, in a literal fulfillment of St. Paul’s warning that “the day of the Lord … cometh as a thief in the night”?2

NOTES 1. Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times Magazine (May 24,2004). Seymour Hersh, ‘Annuals of National Security,”"Torture at Abu Ghraib,” and ‘American Soldiers Brutaliyd Iraqis. Haw Far Dots Ou Responsibility Go?” New Yorker (May 10, 2004; May 17, 2004; and May 24, 2004); Mark Danner, “Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Stay ” New York Review of Boolu (October 7, 2004). 2. hotel Carby, 1M Strange and Bitter Crop: The Spectacle of Torture, ” www.openoemocracy.net, October 11, 2004. 3. In this sense, the Hooded Man exemplifies what Rosalind Krauss has called “the post-medium condition,” in its emulation of the circulation of commodities and signs of commodities such as corporate logos. see Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” Art in the Age of the Poll- Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 4. Meyer Schapim, “Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text, ” Words, Script, and Pictures: Semiotics of Visual Language New York Braollet, 1996). 5. see Charles Marsh, “Wayward Christian Soldiers, ” New York Times, op-ed page, January 20, 2006, fir an account of the Christian evangelical role in the invasion of Iraq, including prowar sermons on the prospects for converting Muslims to Christianity the analogy between Saddam Hussein and Nebuchadnezzar and the importance of war in the Middle East as a preparation for the “earth’s fatal days.” 6. Honorais Augustodunensis, Gemma Animae I, quoted in Schapim, 60-1. 7. Ibid., 39, 43. 8. see Salon.com, March 14, 2006: www.salon.com/neaa/ Jeature/2006/03/14/tortim_photo. J. see Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (New York: Harper Collais, 2004), 29, for a description of this scene. 10. It seems, however, that the resemblance to images of Christ was not completely hit on the immediate participants in the torture; see discussion of Sabrina Harmon, below. 11. This distinction is discussed by William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven: Yale Press, 1993). 12. It is worth noting that Schafnro calls attention to the “inert mask” that often characterizes the face of “the ceremonial fetish of the god frontal” (83), an effect that ream in western paintings of the godhead: “the fill-face is sometimes blind, a schematic mask that is turned toward one but has no penetrating gay” (92). 13. On the terrorist as rival sovereign, see sociologist Vtncenzp Raggiero, “Terrorism: cloning the enemy” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31 (2003), 23-34. 14. Carl Sfhmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, George Schwab, trans., with joreword by Tracy Strong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 13. Michel Faucauli notes the symmetry between the bodies of the sovereign and the condemned criminal in Discipline and Punish, Alan Sheridan, irons. (New York: Vintage, 1977): “In the darkest region of the political field Ae condemned man represents Ae symmetrical, inverted figure of the king” (29). 16. Schafnro notes that, “pagan opponents of Christianity had mocked Ae cult of a God crucified Mu a common criminal” (51). 17. see Richard T. Cooper, “General Casts War in Religious Terms,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2003. 19. Quoted in JoAm Wfpijewski, ‘Judgment Days: Lessons Jrom the Abu Grtmb Courts-martial, ” Harper’s Magazine (Febnuny 2006), 47. Mark Donner notes Aat torturt victims wen sometimes ordered to curse Islam and to “thank Jesus” that they were allowed to Hoe in his Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (Mw York: New York Review of Books, 2004), 227. 19. Schapiro. 61. 20. Hans Haacke, “Stargazing” (2004). 21. I Thessalomans 5:2.

W.J.T. MITCHELL is professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, and editor of Critical Inquiry. His most recent book is What Do Pictures Want? (2005), and the essay printed here is part of a forthcoming book entitled Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib.

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