Todd Lappin at BoingBoing:
"Some interesting comments from a front page story in Thursday's Washington Post* about the role digital cameras have played in in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse debacle. If Vietnam was the first televised war, Iraq will probably be remembered as the war in which personal media technology altered the course of history."
One might conclude: if television had been dominating close to the end of the Vietnam war, if digicams, emails and blogs (“The Modern Trinity of Enlightenment”) are the dominating and challenging powers after the official end of the Iraq War, hopefully phonecams, moblogs and videoblogs are the inhibiting powers before the next war (dewy-eyed and greenly, I know) or at least the altering powers at the beginning.
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*Washington Post:
For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets.
Bill Lawson, whose nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is one of the soldiers charged in the incident, said that Frederick sent home pictures from Iraq on a few occasions. They were "just ordinary photos, like a tourist would take" and nothing showing prisoner abuse, he said.
"I would say that's something that's very common that's going on in Iraq because it's so convenient and easy to do," Lawson said of troops sending pictures home. He added that his nephew also mailed videocassettes "of him talking into a camcorder to [his wife] when he was going on his rounds."
But in the case of prisoner abuse, the ubiquity of digital cameras has created a far more combustible international scandal that would have been sparked only by the release of Taguba's searing written report. Since the "60 Minutes II" broadcast, pictures of abuse have been posted on the Internet and shown on television stations worldwide.
