Interrogations - Coco Fusco and a call to arms

A Field Guide for Female Interrogators

Coco Fusco

A review, sort of:

Coco Fusco’s A Field Guide was oddly powerful. Short, only 142 pages long, with large type, it took me less than an hour to read. Yet, I wouldn’t call it an easy book. It hits home in a number of ways – asking, in essence, that we confront our understandings of, and admit our biases and stereotypes about, women, war, torture, and fear to name just a few of the things she covers.

I found myself taking notes on almost every page. Not just about my project on the Hercules Teams in NYC but about the importance of thinking about how our accepted cultural norms are embedded so deeply that even those of us who consider ourselves feminists, even those of us who (think we) oppose(d) the War on Terror and all it entails, and even those of us who were horrified and sickened by the (fraction of the total number of) abuses revealed in Iraq, are in many ways complicit with the very actions we (conceptually) abhor.

Fusco starts with her own reactions to the photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and follows those reactions through to a rather despairing conclusion: that at least in the military, feminism seems to have devolved into a simple equation: equality = act just like a man. And that includes perpetrating violence in a number of arenas – particularly in interrogation rooms.

In order to understand interrogation techniques so she can hope to understand why women seem to be participating without qualm, Fusco and a group of women academics attend an interrogation school. While she learns a lot, she doesn’t seem to learn quite what she’d hoped to; she was looking for the why, and she got the how. Still, she successfully gives us a sense of the setting, and the possibility for understanding how sexuality and vulnerability come into play in the wielding of power.

Fusco’s continued use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ to refer to women bothered me at first. In essence this phrasing pulls all women into her point of view, and assumes that our perceptions and reactions will be the same as hers – because we are women. Cultural theorists and feminists have spent a great many years taking this notion apart. “Women” is not ‘a group’ defined by any characteristics that cross all the boundaries, and cannot be understood as such. Eventually I realized that Fusco does this on purpose. ‘We’ are indeed who she speaks for – maybe women, maybe Americans, maybe Westerners, maybe the readers of her book. Whoever ‘we’ are, she is part of us.

This is based on the same argument as her exploration of the source of our shock when we find out that women have participated voluntarily in strategic aggression: power plays with fellow soldiers, and harsh and violent interrogation techniques. Her argument is that our shock at finding out that women participated in the abuses in Abu Graib, and that female soldiers in fact (appear to) use their femininity as power, is unfounded because it is based on American society’s belief in a false collective female ethical or moral high ground based on our history as oppressed victims. In other words: we believe women wouldn’t really participate in torture because they / we are somehow not wired that way; they / we are ethically / morally unable to use power in that manner.

I felt the same resistance to her use of the initials US (without the periods, as in U.S.) to refer to the United States). The United States became US became us, became me. Her use of language made me part of the problem.

And yet, that indeed is her entire point. I am complicit. Her book is a call to arms, really, and a challenge. Do ‘we’ sit back and continue to rationalize this War on Terror and the abuses it is perpetrating on hundreds of thousands of people away by ignoring it, by assuming that our protests of its inception were enough, by feeling horrified? Or do we step up?

At least, that’s what I took from it. And my answer is that I step up.

No Pictures Please

Recently I read in a New York Times article that photojournalists are not being allowed to photograph - and certainly not allowed to print anything they do manage to get - anything the U.S. government deems too... shall we say, too real. The story was about a photographer not allowed anymore to even be near 'sensitive' areas in Iraq; from what I can tell, this is standard procedure.

I won't even discuss freedom of speech, freedom of information, censorship or the rest. That is certainly an issue but one (or many) I'll leave to others. For now I just want to focus on the basic concept that because of this sanitizing of the photos we see here in the U.S., many people still believe what we're doing over there is a good thing.

For the sake of this post I'll stay away from the actual politics and not talk about whether we have a right to be there, whether we should be leaving now or later, what lies were told to get us there in the first place, and I'll, again, focus on photos.

Anyone not an idiot has been sure to notice the lack of images of war in the news - we don't see the blood, the gore, the body parts. We don't see Americans dying. We hear cold numbers - 4,000. Four thousand and more dead in a war... and we see none of it?

We don't see Iraqis dying. The numbers here range from 10,000 - 100,000 depending on who you listen to - at its lowest, it's more than double the Americans who died.

And no matter who it is, we see no pictures. We don't see the screaming children covered in blood, the broken faces of mothers and fathers who have lost their sons or daughters in errant firefights, mistaken identity, stray bullets, or a suicide bomb. We don't see the shattered shops or homes. We don't get before and after images that shows us that Baghdad wasn't a backwater slum to begin with. This we don't see because it would make us monsters.

We don't see the destruction on the face of a young soldier who has just had to kill a man, who has seen his comrades die at his side, who has to live his life facing the fact that he is responsible for the deaths of tens, of hundreds of people. This we don't see because it would make us ask 'is it worth it?'

We don't see dead soldiers. At least, we don't see dead American soldiers. These we don't see because it would make it too real.

When we do see dead soldiers, they are nameless Iraqis. These we get to see because they are, after all, not us. They are 'other,' they are enemy.

Ultimately, we don't see this war. We get excuses: showing photographs of the dead will hurt the families; it will dishonor the dead; it is not the point.

Actually, it is the only point.
If Americans could actually see - in living, bloody color - what war does to people, they might think twice (or four times, or eight) about sending young men and women out to kill others.
If Americans could see - in living, bloody color - what death really looks like, they'd be a lot less likely to vote into office another man who would jump at the chance to attack, who believes war is inevitable.
And if Americans were actually allowed to see - in living, bloody color - what war truly IS, they would, I think, work harder to figure out how not to destroy lives in this way again.

As it is, we open the paper and see words on the page: another soldier died in Kirkuk, another suicide bomber killed 10 or 20 or 40; another house was mistakenly bombed and 5 children killed. These words might begin to tell a story, but for us to truly understand, we need to see it.

We need to see what we bring into the world. We need to see what our actions do. For if we cannot see - in living, bloody color - what five children killed really looks like, then that is the tragedy. That is the dishonor. And that is the path to yet more and more - and more - dead children.

I say let the photographers in, let them make their own choices about what is fit for us to see. It's easy. If you don't want to see what this war is, what it does, what we do - then don't look.

It is always our choice to turn away and to choose what not to see.