“Inquisition,” by Francisco Goya. Crucifixion, by U.S. Army specialist Sabrina Harman.)

The picture on the left is by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828). It’s from a series of notebook sketches he drew in an attempt to depict the Spanish Inquisition‘s (1478-1834) prosecution of “heretics.” Not its most graphic horrors, such as strangulations and public burnings, but the Inquisitor’s use of humiliation and fear as a form of torture. The picture on the right is a work by Army Specialist Sabrina Harman, who has testified “that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis.” Other sources report that the subject, an Iraqi prisoner, was being prepared for a mock execution. It is unclear, given the beatings administered to his fellows, whether he knew that it was “mock.” Nor could he have been aware, given his dunce cap, that the visual he presented was of a crucifixion, the beams of the “cross” made not of wood but of the wires attached to his hands.

 

		The lynching of Rubin Stacy, 1935. Private Lynndie England and an Iraqi prisoner, 2004.)

 

A crucial element of torture is humiliation. The fact of the victim’s powerlessness must be impressed upon his psyche. Laughter is an effective tool, as demonstrated by this Inquisitor, 21-year-old Private Lynndie England, of Ft. Ashby, W. Virginia. And genitals are often the focus of attention. Private England, since transferred back to the U.S., where she is expecting the child ofSpecialist Charles W. Graner (who also appears in the pictures), is here forcing the prisoners to masturbate — a tactic proposed by her superiors in Military Intelligence to insult the prisoner’s Islamic sensibilities and thus break his will through sexual shame.

Sexual shame is always double-edged, as illustrated in the picture on the left. It shows the 1935 lynching of Rubin Stacy, in Ft. Lauderdale. Young girls from the area, including the one seen here on the left, were brought out to witness Stacy’s emasculation and murder. They are orderly, they are high-minded and also high-spirited. They are smiling. They are a congregation, not a mob, gathered to view the Inquisitor’s work, undertaken on their behalf, for the sanctity of their community, for the sacred order of “civilization.”

UPDATE: The New Yorker‘s Seymour M. Hersh has obtained a copy of a secret report on American abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. Major General Antonio M. Taguba, commissioned by Lt. General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq. Hersh excerpts Gen. Taguba’s list of offenses, committed, charges Gen. Taguba, with the approval of top ranking officers as part of procedure: “Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”
“Torture at Abu Ghraib”

UPDATE: My colleague Peter Manseau at Killing the Buddha reads the hooded-man photographdifferently.

May 8 UPDATE: New torture pictures from Iraq, new Revealer analysis: “The Mirror and the Leash.”

View the complete Revealing Photos Archives.