I agree that there is no instantaneous connection that would make release of the abuse photos bring about positive change. But then, you seem to believe that Obama’s executive orders have pretty much wrapped up the torture issue. I disagree, and if you have read my articles on the 2006 Army Field Manual and interrogation then you’ll understand much of why I must disagree with you on this point.

But the problem is not one seems to be able to cite a specific historical example in which pictures of torture, or some other form of evil doing, actually moved the policy mountain. What I am questioning is the intellectual dependence on this belief without an evidence bank. I too do not believe torture should be in the tool bag of national policy or practice, but I am trying to suggest that ending that, making sure it will not happen again, has to stand on a more solid footing than just having access to pictures of consequences to look at and study.

As to the constant loop of planes flying into buildings. I think FDR got it right on that one if you remember the end clause in his famous 1933 pronouncement about Fear. He said that creating or allowing Fear to dominate led to paralysis that made it difficult if not impossible to commit to action that might relieve the conditions highlighted by fear.

In no uncertain terms, I would suggest Bush/Cheney et. al., ran with the 9/11 business, including looping the video of the attack on the WTC, simply because it induced fear leading to paralysis — and their interests were served by this in multiple ways. They wanted Permanent and unobstructed Power, and it is a little easier to accomplish that if many of your likely critics are paralized with fear.

But this is not at all the same as mass viewing of pictures of US Authorized torture. Those who argue for this are, in my mind, depending on people looking at the pictures, being revolted by the pictures, and then demanding effective political action to end whatever policy allowed it. I think this is a highly unreliable assumption if your goal is to end any authority or permission to allow torture.

I would suggest that at this point, without benefit of any pictures, Obama has pretty much made himself hostage to his anti-Torture Executive Orders. If in fact it can be shown that someone in the chain of command either tortures, or allows torture, the buck for that lands on Obama’s desk. I am not talking about things that occurred under Bush/Cheney, but things that could happen since Obama issued orders. While it is not impossible that some rogue piece of the Military and Security Industrial Complex may still house some covert torturers, where Obama has put himself pretty much guarentees that the old policy is offically dead, and that any new torture would be harshly prosecuted, and if it happens, it will damage the President.

The “GWOT” was and is played up because the military, intelligence, and ancillary national security and industrial-technical agencies and industries needed something to replace the gravy train that had been the Cold War. The threats of Al Qaeda are a pale reflection of the ICBMs the Kremlin aimed at the U.S. “homeland”. But the ideologues who run this country are insistent that the collective PTSD that watching planeloads of helpless human beings smashed into buildings in a fiery airliner gotterdammerung engendered in the average American, who viewed (and still view) this nightmarish disastrous crime over and over on television and YouTube, that this collective PTSD (and who does not freeze inside when they see a plane fly low over a city skyline) is used to manipulate fear and make Americans dependent and docile upon their leaders.

That’s what’s happened, and don’t think they aren’t aware of the power of such things. They don’t spend millions on psywar for nothing.

So, the power of pictures is paramount. Oh yes.

obama is david axelrod’s creature,

his pygmalion.

americans bought a pygmalion in a poke

when they supported and voted for obama.

comprehension of this sad fact has been slow to dawn.

from april, 2007 nytimes -http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE6DA1230F932A35757C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=4

pay close attention to the last paragraph of the quote.

“Obama’s Narrator

BEN WALLACE-WELLS

Published: April 1, 2007

Photos: Biographer: David Axelrod with Barack Obama in the senator’s Capitol Hill office. (Photograph by Jamie Rose); Street Fighter: To find out what voters are thinking, Axelrod heads to the political wards of Chicago. (Photograph By Paul D’amato For The New York Times)

Axelrod says that his model for the Obama campaign came last year when Deval Patrick ran for governor of Massachusetts. There are many ways in which Patrick’s run and Obama’s are similar: the optimism, the constant presence of the candidate’s biography, the combination of a crusading message of reform with the candidate’s natural pragmatism, the insistence that normal political categories did not apply, even the same, unofficial slogan, shouted from the crowds — ”Yes. We. Can!” But most essential is the way in which both of these campaigns came to use the symbolism that accompanies their candidates’ race, not by apologizing for it or ignoring it but by embracing the constant attention paid to the historic nature of the candidacy itself. The Democratic media consultant David Eichenbaum, whose candidate, Chris Gabrieli, lost to Patrick and Axelrod in Massachusetts, told me: ”What they were able to do in the Patrick campaign was similar to what they’ve been able to do with Obama. The campaign managed to energize the grass roots, but there was a sense of idealism and hope and being able to break that historic barrier that was very unifying and reached out beyond liberals or the base. It became a movement that took on a life of its own.”

At the beginning of January, on a sunny day in the middle of the Northeast’s strange extended warm spell, Axelrod traveled to Boston for Patrick’s inaugural. Recounting it for me afterward, he said, ”I really thought a lot about this Obama thing, and I thought, You know, these are really the moments you work for, and I thought, how amazing would it be to be not at the Massachusetts Statehouse but at the U.S. Capitol for that.”

III. …”

Bob in AZ