Iain Boal Heads in a Box

8/12/2019 Iain Boal Heads in a Box

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H eads In ox

y Iain oal On September l i , 2001 GarySchroen had just enrolled in the CIA s re tirem en ttransition program . One week later, the formerstation chief in Kabul and Islamabad wason a plane to Afghanistan, leading a six-manassassination team in the hun t for Osama BinLaden and his general staff

In his mem oir Rrst /n , Schroen recalled theorders he received fro m Cofer Black, the CIA shead of counter-terrorism: Capture Bin Laden,kill him and b ring his head back in a box on dryice. As for Bin Laden s associates, Cofer said, I wa nt th eir heads on pikes .

Schroen remem bers his reply to Cofer: Sir, those are the clearest orders I have everreceived. I can certainly make pikes out inthe field but I d on t know what I ll do aboutdry ice to bring the head back - b ut w e llmanage something.

No t much, as it turne d o ut. No dry ice,no pikes. He returned hom e e mpty-handedto the company s retiremen t program .Apparently he retained his faith in the agency,since in 2005 he confessed surprise th at theCIA had sti ll not managed to track Bin Ladendown after nearly fou r years.

The hu nt, wh ich had begun years earlierin the Clinton presidency, apparently endedthis May in the old garrison town of Ab botabadin Pakistan. Apparently, th at is to say, becauseseriously con flicting accounts of wh athappened on the night o f May 2nd imm ediatelybegan to em anate from both o fficial andoff-the-record sources followin g the commandoraid on the compound in Abbottabad.

In addition , the Pentagon refused to releaseany official photographs tha t wo uld crediblyestablish the a l Qaeda chief as havin g beenamong those killed in the attack. The resultwas hardly surprising, since the nature oftoday s m edia abhors an image vacuum.Editors under pressure certainly had footageand photos of Bin Laden while alive but t ha twas hardly the point o f this story. Quitepredictably, photographs from unofficial

sourcessupposedly of the dead Bin Laden-showed up in newspaper stories around theworld, and began to circulate immediatelyin the infosphere.

Whether authentication was going tobe an issue would depend on the outcomeof eorge W. Bush s bulletin from the w ildWest frontier: Bin Laden: Wa nted, Dead orAlive . Capturing Bin Laden alive w ould haveits own problems; the iasco of SaddamHussein s tria l and execution was testam entto tha t. Bin Laden s corpse would inevitablypresent a differe nt set of issues.

Verification has two faces. On the oneside, there is the in ternal m atter o f thecommandos having to satisfy the ir officerstha t the job has been done, th at the y havegot the right man. On the other there isthe PR problem fo r the state managers whohave signed off on the assassination, andnot just because it s hard to trus t aphotograph these days.

Althou gh th e CIA had long been in theassassination businessPatrice Lumum baand Fidel Castro are two notorious namesonce on a CIA hit listthe state-sanctionedmurder o f foreign enemies was (officially)proscribed follow ing the crisis of legitimacybrought on by the defeat in Vietnam and theWatergate scandal at home. At least in thesense that McNamara and co, howeverconcerned they became about the mediareception domestically, paid little or noheed to the circulation o f images amongthe pop ulation of Vietnam or the Third Worldin general. In March 19 75, President Fordannounced at a press conference, I will notcondonein fact I condemnany CIA

involvement in any assassination planningor action...l am personally looking at,analyzing all of the more recent chargesof any assassination a ttemp ts by the CIAor actual assassinations from its inceptionto th e present. In early 197 6, he issued anexecutive order banning assassinations,follo win g the Church Commission srecommendations. Church remarked thatit was simply intolerable th at any agencyof the governmen t of the United States mayengage in murder.

Norm al service was resumed in the 1990sunder President Clinto n. According to RicharClarke, one of the president s advisors: He broke a 25-year tradition and agreed thatthere should be a hit list. The United Statesgovernment should sponsor the assassinationof terrorists. Clin ton favoured the use of cruismissiles, but that carried wi th it the riskof collatera l damage and related difficulties.Large explosions are also likely to o blite ratethe target and destroy the evidence neededfor different reasons by the high commandand the media mills. Pictures of large cratersor piles of rubble may be compelling evidenceof the ability of the US m ilitary to deliver terrfrom the air but who ever doubted that?

Nevertheless, on Clinton s orders theUS stationed tw o nuclear submarines off thePakistani coast ready to launch cruise missilesif the most wa nted enemy was located.Michae l Scheuer, head o f the CIA Bin Ladenunit, has claimed tha t before September 11 ,2001, the intelligence was sometimes goodenough to fire . Just before Christmas 1998,Bin Laden was known to be staying overnightin a room in the governor s palace in


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Kandahar. W e knew he was there . Scheuersaid, because we saw him go into the ro om ,and we know which w ing of the palace, whicroom he was in...and the president and hisadvisers decided tha t Well, if we kill him, somof the shrapnel might hit a mosque that wasabout 300 metres away .

After September the full panoply ofstate violence was mobilised, from blltzkreig(including discussion of e arth-pen etrating

nuclear bunker busters) to small-team speciaoperations ( to take the head off the snake ),urged on by the political com mentariat of anation in shock that had never before sufferedaerial bombardment of its m ainland. LanceMorrow, in a special edition of Time publishein the wake of the attacks, fulmina ted, LetAmerica explore the rich reciprocal qu alitiesof the fatwa ...What s needed isa sort ofunified, unifying Pearl Harbour sort of purpleAmerican fury.

The purple fury was exem plified by CoferBlack s Intempe rate order heads on pikes which was however quite consistent wit h the

strange amalgam o f the newfangled and theatavistic t ha t has characterized Ame ricanstatecraft since 2001. Black now claims tha tthe order demanding Bin Laden s d ecapitationwas issued to aid id entification . You have tohave a com pelling proof th at you ve beensuccessful and it can t be, We ll it looked likehim . Altho ugh Obama s White Housemaintains tha t had Bin Laden imm ediatelysurrendered he could have been taken alive,tha t view is contradicted by one specialoperations officer who to ld a freelancejourna list: There was never any questionof detaining or capturing himit wasn t

a split-second d ecision. No one wanteddetainees. Shades of Guantanamo.In the event, according to the same

freelancer s accou nt, A pair of SEALsunloaded the body bag and unzipped it sotha t McRaven [who was in comman d of JoinSpecial Operations] and the CIA officer couldsee Bin Laden s corpse wit h th eir ow n eyes.Photographs w ere taken of Bin Laden s faceand then o f his outstretche d body. Bin Ladenwas believed to be about six feet four bu tno one had a tape measure to con firm thebody s leng th. So one SEAL, w ho was six feettall , lay beside the corpse: it measured roughl

four inches longer than the Am erican.Minutes later McRaven appeared on th eteleconference screen in the Situation Roomand confirmed tha t Bin Laden s body was inthe bag...All along, the SEALs had planned todum p Bin Laden s corpse into th e seaa blu ntway of end ing the Bin Laden myth.

At any rate tha t is one version of wh at

Photocomposite widely circulated as an image of the corpse of Bin Laden and the elements used in its making -Photoworks have obscured the face of the dead man out of respect to h im and his family.


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happened, as published in an August 201 1

New orker piece by Nicholas Sch midle. Thewo rld o f spooks and special ops is of coursea hall of m irrors, an echo chamber ofdisinfo rmatio n, and very conflic ting accountsbegan to come out of th e Pentagon, Langleyand the White House in tbe hours and daysafter the attack. Tbe Schmidle accountsupposedly pierced through the fog of wa rto tell tbe insidestory of Operation Neptune'sSpear and the final bun ting down of C ranksha ft . Tbe hardwa re used by tbeassassination squad is described inpornographic d etail and sm all arms brandnames given fetishistic a ttentio n - Ian

Fleming meets the History Channel. A llpresumably intended to suggest an l-was-tbere authenticity: one of the assassins, forexample, was wearing 'a shirt and trousersin Desert Digita l Camouflage, and carrieda silenced Sig Sauer P226 pisto l, along wi thextra amm unition; a CamelBak, for hyd ration;and gel sbots, for endurance. He held ashort-barrel, silenced i^ r ifle. (O ther SEALshad chosen the H eckler & Kocb MP7.)'

In fact the reporter, Nicholas Schmidle,never spoke to any of those on th e missio n,and turns ou t to be the son of a generalin Special Operations who is currently the

Deputy Chief of US Cyber Command. Al laccounts, including Scbmidle's, shouldtherefore be taken with a pinch of salt.Nevertheless, the statements coming fro mvarious sources within the state a pp ara tus-including the wishful thinking of a SEALofficer 'I'm sort of glad we left tbe helicopterthere. It quiets the conspiracy mongers ou t

there and instantly lends credibility. You

believe everything else insta ntly, becausethere's a helicopter sittin g there'all speaknot just to the intrinsic nature of suchoperations, always on the brink o f chaos,or to the bungling and incompetence at thePR end of things, but to a much deeper setof problems facing the superintendents ofempire. They have found themselvesincreasingly drawn in to micromanag ing themeans of symbolic produ ction, as well as thebusiness of enforcement.

The state, in other words, has becomeenmeshed in new modes of representationand mediationin particular the internet

and the globa l reach of al jazeerathat havedeveloped since tbe end of th e last majorconflict in which the US was involved, thewar in Indochina. The defeat in Vietnam wasnot experienced by the P entagon or the StateDepartment as a failure o f mastery in therealm of representation.

Al Oaeda was quite a different foe, becauseit grasped an essential fact ab out modernstates, tha t they live more and more in andthroug h the image. Historically, the terrorismof states and their enemies circulatedwasintended to circulatein the form o f rumou rrather than image. Terror performed its work,

in other words, throug h hearsay and panicand fear. September n t h was different. It wasdesigned above all to be visible, to c irculate asimage. (Not tha t there wasn't a precedent;more than half tbe world's m otion picturefilm stock was used to record the mu shroomclouds rising from the Ab le and Bakerthermonuclear explosions in the Pacific.)

No assassin, no propagandist o fth e deed,ever matched the impact of tbe aviators whostruck the Wo rld Trade Center in 2001. Theevent signalled the arrival in the h eartlandof global capital of a new model vanguard,managing a coup de thtre combining twoof the key apparatus of modernity - theairplane and tbe camera. First, Atta and hiscrews turned the planes back in to the iroriginal function as vehicles of the w eapons

of mass destru ction . Secondly, even in itsrejection of the West, the Islamic vanguarddisplayed a grasp of the virtual w ithinmodernity, and especially the new technicsof reproduction and dissemination - and thepossibilities o f the camera, the video clip andtbe internet.

The US impe rium suffered a defeat onSeptember 11 at the level of spectacle andever since has been tryin g to frame a reply,by means ofth e same symbolic apparatus,that w ould be commensurate with thedestruction of the Twin Towers. Andinevitably failing.

For a decade the state propagandists havebeen lurching from bathos to fiasco. In thecase of Saddam, from rent-a-crowd statue-topp ling in Baghdad a transparently stage-managed parody of iconoclasm) to tria l bytongue depressor and on to an absurdistexecution scene.

The frustration of Bush's Secretary ofDefence at this state of affairs was evidentin a no torious rant delivered to the Councilon Foreign Relations. 'Our federal governme nis really only beginning to adapt our op erationto the 21st century. For tbe m ost part, theU.S. government still functions as a iv and

dime store in an eBay world. Today we'reengaged in the first war in hi sto ry -unconven tional and irregular asit m ay bein an era of e -mails, b logs, cellphones, Blackberrys, instant messaging,digita l cameras, a global Internet with noinhibitions , hand-held video-cameras, talkradio, 2 t-hour news broadcasts, satellitetelevis ion. There's never been a war foughtin this environmen t before.'

Osama Bin Laden's chief lieutenantAyman al-Zawahiri revealed himself to be onthe same wavelength: 'More than h alf of thisbattle is taking place in the battlefield of th e

media.' Rumsfeld in turn recognised that hisopponen t und erstood the new landscape, andcomm ented th at al-Zawa hiri was not 'somemodern-day image consultant in a publicrelations firm here in New York City...Considetha t the violent extremists have establishedmedia relations committeesthese areterrorists and they have media relations

Above: in this undated image made from video seized from the walled com pound of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Abbo ttabad , Pakistaand released Saturday, May 7, 2011 by the U.S. Department of Defense. (AP Photo/Department of Defense, File


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committees that meet and talk aboutstrategy, not with bullets but wi th words...They plan and design their headline-grabbingattacks using every means of comm unication

to intim idate and break the collective wi llof free people.Rumsfeld s prescription, thoug h

technocratic and worthy of the most banalmediologist, recognised the common terra in: The longer It takes to p ut a strategiccomm unication framew ork in place, themore we can be certain that the vacuum w illbe filled by the enemy...The U.S. governmentw ill have to develop an institu tiona l capabilityto anticipate and act with in the [currentglobalised] news cycle. That wi ll requireinstituting 2t-hour press operation centers,elevating internet operations and other

channels of comm unication to equal statuswi th tra dition al 20 th century press relations.It s no t clear tha t the image managers are

doing any better under Obama than they didunder Bush. The decision to kil l Bin Ladencreated a m artyrdom problem; the decisionto mitigate the martyrdom problem bydum ping the body at sea created a verification

problem; the d ecision not t o release thephotographs of th e corpse (to deal with theimage-of-the-martyr problem) or of theclimax of Operation Neptune s Spear created

a vacuum leaving the field open tophotoshoppers, truthists and anyone ator near the scene w ith a phone camera.

Just to address, for the mom ent, thequestion of verification and the authe nticityof photographic images. This is not a trivialproblem, and far from a new one. Indeed itgoes all the way back to the birth o f themedium. Actually, for the pioneers ofphotography the doctoring o f negatives wasa routine ma tter. And for a variety o f reasons- sometimes, to create an image that couldbe publishable as a book plate, by means ofpastings and touch-up s; sometimes it was

done simp ly for aesthetic reasons, since light-w riting was seen as a kind of first draft;sometimes, for practical reasons having todo with the technical state of the craft. Forexample, Muybridge and Watkins, in makingtheir great landscape photographs, w ouldoften cobble together tw o separate negativesof sky and foreground, each with different

exposures, because we t plate technologyusing collodion on glass producedoverexposed and bleached skies.

These manipulations and technical

fudgings were, you might say, innoc entartifacts of the mid-Victorian limitationsof plate sensitivity and shutter technology.On the other hand, they certainly wereproblematic n the case of the famousphotographs taken by Muybridge andcommissioned by the railway baron andhorse breeder Leland Stanford. Muybridgewas employed sp ecifically to achieve imagestha t wou ld adjudicate whether all four legs oa trot tin g horse were ever in the air at thesame time , using the camera as scientificarbiter of t ruth. The early res ults weredesperately am biguous, and of course

photography s relation to the real remainsa profoundly vexed question. Not to say oftenabsurd: consult Alain )aubert s ieComm issariat aux Archives: Les Photos quiFalsifient L Histoire fo r hilarious examples of before and after photographsof those beingairbrushed from history.

The role of photography in the history

Above: President arack Obama and members of the national security team in the Situation Room of the White H ouse May i, 2011.A classified docum ent seen in this ph otog raph has been obscured. Wh ite House (Photo: Pete Souza)


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of propaganda, though at times ludicrous,raises complex and serious questions.Presumably the reason why the new ub iquityof the phone-camerafacilitating photographyfrom below, subveillance as it wereis provingawkward for the pow erful is because there issomething to the idea of the camera as atruth machine.

On this topic the photographic historianSteve Edwards has some interestin g reflections

at the conclusion of his Very hort introdu tionto Photography The technology has nowreached the point where the fund am entalfeatures tha t made an image photographic,namely, traces of light captured by a receptivesubstance on a film plane, may be lost. This isthe dangeror the promiseimplicit infull-bore digitiza tion. Edwards advises againstpanic at the prospect, and quotes Allan Sekulaon the ma tter: the 'old myth tha t photographstel l the tru th has succumbed to the new m yththat they don't'.

Since the photographic evidence a ttestingto the t ru th of Bin Laden's death is being

withh eld, its veracity is moo t. (Which raises

an interesting topic: why did no one challengethe photographs from Abu Ghraib?) Mostof the s urrogate images of the assassinatedBin Ladendragged and dropped in to fill th elacunawere obviously faked or photoshopped.

The photograph of the bed and theblood-stained carpet does, on the o ther hand,have an authentic feel. Its quality suggests th atit was taken by a camera phone. But wh atexactly is it evidence of? Clearly something

gory. And familiar enough from endless CSIreruns. But if CSI is the p oint o f reference here,then that makes the Abbottabad compoundmore a crime scene than a war zone. And if so,then w hose crime? And indeed, what crime?The transgressing of national sovereignty andthe rules of intern ationa l law?

s for the photographs tha t have beenofficially released, contradictions abound .The shot of Osama alone and watchin g amo nitor is intended presumably to locate himin the Abbottaba d com pound. He is sitting ona couch in his entertainm ent centre , witha beanie on his head and a remote co ntrol in

his hand. The image deflates and dim inishes

its subject; it is presumably m eant to do so.It represents a kind of humiliation.

But, if so, then w hat is its relationshiptoin wha t ways does it speak tothephotograph released by the W hite Houseof Obama watching TV with friends in theSituation Room? We are not allowed to seewha t Obama's team are seeing. Someone inthe room later described it - 'like watch ingthe climax of a movie'. But when Am ericans

are shown clustered round a

do mestic TV, itmeans usually one thing: they are watch ingsport. Obama's posture combines the tensionof the baseball fan and the passivity of thespectator In the society of the spectacleshould we be surprised that the tw o m ostwidely circulated images surroundingOperation Neptune's Spear are picturesof people watching TV. Or that th e'situ ationthe group is absorbed in w hat appears to besome kind of game?

The management o f N eptune's Spear fel lshort, no doub t, of Rumsfeld's vision for theideal state media apparatus, a vision at one

wi th the system of private power that he

This frame grab from video obtained exclusively by ABC News, on Monday, May 2, 2011, shows a section of a room in the interior of the com pouwhere it is believed al-03ida leader Osama bin Laden lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan. (AP Photo/ABC New


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served. A system in which human ac tivitiesand products are valued insofar as theyparticipate, as abstractions or ph antoms,in a c ircu itof exchange. The spectacle isatheory o f the ong oing consequences of th atghost-dance for the day-to-day substance ofhuman interactions and self-understanding,and the specific po litical problems andopportunities tha t follow as m ateriality cedesto appearance.

The assassination of in Laden, years afterhis kill-by date, was intended to close a chapterin the U.S. state's response to th e s pectaculardefeat of September l i . Yet the sense of

bathos that lingers in the (image) memory ofSaddam Hussein in captivity clings also to thephotos vouchsafed us of Operation Neptune'sSpear and the killing of Crankshaft . Thestate was forced to try to manufacture perimpossibile an adequate response to theevents of that day in 2001, and it termina tedin anti-climax in the footh ills of the Hindu

Kush. Nothin g, of course, in the realm o fspectacle, could conceivably match thehorrendous perfection ofth at image ofcapitalism's negation. Negation not once,bu t a second time , ensuring that thousandsof cameras would be recording the d readfulscene. No bulletin was issued, no explanationwas needed.

The state has had no option but torespond on th e terra in o f the image preciselybecause the spectacle is not merely a networkof images but a fabric of social con trol,incorpora ting the image world, certainly, butnot constituted by that w orld.

The old Secretary of Defence's plea for acomm unications upgrade was an indicationof the anxiety induced by analbeit vulgarand half-bakedunderstanding of wh at is atstake, and know ingthat control of the imageworld is far from secure. The contradictionsof an increasingly 'wire d' world have sincebeen revealed by the ope rations of Julian

Assange and wikiLeaks. One may agree tha tthe new technics have redrawn po litics andjournalism, while remaining dubious aboutthe ability of any particular photoshop ofhorrors or data-dump to inflict permanentdamage upon either Empire or Jihad. At leastwhile the spectacle reigns.

As to what might be involved in image-making against the spectacle tha t is an urgeand difficult question, and one not forphotographers only.

lain Boal is a social historian of scienceand technics associated with Reto rt, the

Bay Area collective of w riters, artists andartisans. He is Fellow of Birkbeck Collegeand a columnist for SFMOMA s Open Space.

Captured former iraqi leader Saddam ussein undergoes medical examinations in Baghdad in this Dec. 14, 200 3 image fro m television . (AP Photo/U S Military via APTN-File


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Boal, Iain

Heads In A Box

Photoworks no17 Wint 2011 p. 44-491742-1659

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Iain Boal Heads in a Box