Photography is Not a Crime

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Photography is Not a Crime

It’s a First Amendment Right

By Carlos Miller

The Homeland Security Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department has published a “Terrorist Awareness Guide” where it advises citizens to be on the lookout for people taking “inappropriate photographs or videos.”

And no, they are not talking about perverts shooting up the skirts of women.

They’re talking about people taking photographs of surveillance cameras and other things that are plainly visible to the naked eye.

Here is an excerpt of what the pamphlet says:

Maybe you are at a National Monument and you
notice a person nearby taking a lot of photos. Not
unusual. But then you notice that he is only taking
photos of t he surveillance cameras, crash barriers at
the entrances, and access control procedures. Is that
normal for a tourist? Absolute not!

The following should cause a heightened sense of
concern:

•       Unusual interest
•       Surveillance
•       Inappropriate photographs or videos
•       Note-taking
•       Drawing of diagrams
•       Annotating maps
•       Using binoculars or night vision devices

It should be noted that Detective Bustamante of the same homeland security bureau was one of the officers who responded to our first Metrorail incident where we were “permanently banned” for taking photos.

Bustamante proved pretty clueless of the law when he informed us we needed a permit to photograph anything within the Metrorail, regardless if we were shooting commercial or not.

Read the entire document below. The portion on photography is on the second page in the right-hand column circled in red.

Terrorist Awareness Guide MDPD-PINAC

Flotilla Fabrication

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“The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”

Lewis Hine 1909

Photographers often get defensive when reminded that many of them resort to ‘digital manipulation’ using the new tools currently available. Discussions about the limits of what is permissible regularly sparks off heated debates, particularly in contests. Jobs have been lost, awards cancelled, and credibility undermined when photographers have digitally manipulated photographs to create the image they have wanted.

Sadly, the arguments raised have largely dealt with issues of technique rather than issues of ethics. One school of thought suggests, ‘if it was doable in a darkroom, then it can be doable in a computer’. Others claim that conventional darkroom techniques, such as dodging, burning, or changing contrast are acceptable, but inserting, taking away, or displacing visual elements are off limits (though these too were, and had been, done in the darkroom). More ‘artistic’ criteria suggest that the essential ‘mood and character’ of the original image must be preserved. None of this addresses the central issue Hine had brought up in 1909. Is the photographer lying?

I believe the discussion needs to shift from ‘how’ the image was altered to ‘why’ it was altered. Indeed, photographers have ‘enhanced’ their images by using filters to darken skies, dodged and burned in the darkroom to change relative emphasis of visual elements, sometimes even eliminated visuals that distracted from what was considered central to the photograph. Subtle changes in tonality and gradation altered the ‘feel’ of an image, affecting the emotional response one might have to the visual experience.  In the analogue days, the skill sets required hand-eye  coordination to a far greater extent than is needed today. The modern photographer needs to learn about pixels, paths and plug-ins. The software used, the amount of RAM and processor speed are the new vocabulary that replaces darkroom tools of yore. But even in the digital age, the skill of the practitioner often determines whether the change is detectable.

There are those who subvert the process and deliberately play on detectability of the process, confronting the viewer with their interventions, questioning her perception of what is acceptable, stretching her boundaries of credibility. Indeed, on occasions, flaunting these very norms to raise uncomfortable issues of how images are read. Early theorists like Professor Fred Ritchin, currently at Tisch School of The Arts, New York University, have eloquently analysed how this ‘manipulation’, instead of undermining the credibility of the photograph, has returned the onus of authenticity upon the integrity of the author rather than the acceptability of the tools (human or mechanical).  One believes a photograph, as one believes a word, based on the reliability of the source, rather than the mode of production. The hugely talented pioneer of digital photography, the Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer, playfully, intelligently and skillfully, toyed with us, shaking the pillars of our age old beliefs, forcing us to question the process of seeing and believing.

Of course the photograph still retains the characteristic of being the primary source. “I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. I have photographs.” It is precisely because the photograph or the video, is seen as an unmoderated fact, that it is so powerful. It is precisely the reason why lying through a video or photograph can be so effective.

In this age of spin, rhetoric and hyperbole, does the liar, by shaking our confidence in the medium, undermine the veracity of the one source that we still implicitly trust? In some ways of course it does, but by doing so, the liar does us a favour. It reminds us to question, not merely the medium but also the source.

Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were believed because they were trustworthy. They had established their credibility. They had a track record that gave their word a respectability that others who said otherwise did not have. I have no way to vouch for the veracity of the incredible claims that they made. That is the basis of a very different discussion. But it is undeniably true that centuries after they have gone, there are people who live by their ideals and are prepared to die for them. The lives that they lived, made their words believable. We believed their actions, which led to us believing their words.

That brings me to the point of this article. The video of the attack on the flotilla. People have correctly pointed to the technical errors in the released videos. The fact that there were white frames inside the sequence, that consecutive frames did not match, that crude alterations revealed the manipulation where people are seen to be walking through metal pylons, the amateurish display of a catapult by turning towards a camera on a tripod and holding it high, in the middle of an attack by armed soldiers, the fact that a voice inserted in the video is that of a woman on another ship, all make the video a laughable piece of ‘evidence’. Indeed, the detection of the tampering is what is being used as evidence of lies being told.

My argument is elsewhere. What if the Israelis had produced the perfect video, backing up their claims. What if their technicians had been more skilled, their computer animations more realistic, their actors more adept and telling their version of the story. Would that have validated their version of the story? I would like to return to who is telling the story. The veracity of the source.

Lies are more difficult to protect than the truth. If the version they had presented had been genuine, there would have been no need to confiscate all the visual material, releasing selective segments, with obvious tampering. If they had nothing to hide there would have been no need to jam the communications at the moment of attack, or to erase the audio from certain segments of the video. There would have been no reluctance to make all the evidence available and let the viewers decide. Suspicious behavior gives rise to suspicion. For a nation known for manipulating the truth at all levels, casting doubts on authentic data, vilifying honest citizens, persecuting every hint of dissent, it is the fact that the source is Israel that is the greatest reason for disbelief.

If a time were to come when Israel had a change of heart and for once spoke the truth, like Matilda in her burning house, there would be none to believe her. That fire is imminent and Israel’s house of lies might well be close to burning.

———————ENDS————————–

Other points of view.

BBC Panorama Video 1

BBC Panorama Video 2

“>Al Jazeera Storming of Gaza aid convoy

Legal assessment of Gaza Flotialla raid

Related links:

Military ties between India and Israel

In Defense of Helen Thomas

Human Rights Council Condemnation of Israeli Attacks

Adopted by a recorded vote of 32 to 3, with 9 abstentions.
The voting was as follows:
In favour: Angola, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritius, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudia Arabia, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, Uruguay;
Against: Italy, Netherlands, United States of America;
Abstaining: Belgium, Burkina Faso, France, Hungary, Japan, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Ukraine, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland:

Power from the barrel of a lens

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By Satish Sharma

Forget about the power that, according to Mao, flows from the Barrels of Guns!

A lot more power actually flows through the matte black barrels of lenses. Camera lenses! And this is a power that flows a lot more silently and, most of the time, it works it magic very subtly.

Very rarely do pictures explode on the media scene like the now infamous cover picture on the August 9th issue of Time magazine. Very rarely do pictures present us with such a questionable and ‘teachable’ moment about photography and its political uses. Rarely do photographs become such a powerful peg for discussions that go on and on. Discussions that need to go on because we have to understand, dissect and discuss the spaces that photography occupies in contemporary society. Spaces that are hardly any different from the times when photography was a medium controlled by the political and secret department of a British colonial government. Photography, we have to remember, was invented at a time when colonialism was at its height and became a major player in the colonial game. Something that British army cadets, who were to be posted in the colonies, were specially taught and equipped for.

Images of Afghanistan by Mohammad Qayoumi (prior to CIA intervention and Russian invasion).

The physical campus of Kabul University, pictured here, does not look very different today. But the people do. In the 1950s and '60s, students wore Western-style clothing; young men and women interacted relatively freely. Today, women cover their heads and much of their bodies, even in Kabul. A half-century later, men and women inhabit much more separate worlds. © Mohammad Qayoumi

In the 1950s and '60s, women were able to pursue professional careers in fields such as medicine. Today, schools that educate women are a target for violence, even more so than five or six years ago. © Mohammad Qayoumi

The central government of Afghanistan once oversaw various rural development programs, including one, pictured here, that sent nurses in jeeps to remote villages to inoculate residents from such diseases as cholera. Now, security concerns alone make such an effort nearly impossible. Government nurses, as well as U.N. and NGO medical workers, are regular targets for insurgent groups that merely want to create disorder and terror in society. © Mohammad Qayoumi

Photography is a powerful language, a valuable voice of authority for authorities. One has to understand how it is used. A “Writing with Light”- Photo Graphy is becoming more powerful than any other human language. It is more than just the world’s first universally understood language, one that needs no translators and appears to have no word language limitations because it is a technology driven by newer and newer technologies which give it a reach and power that no language ever had.

The endless flow of camera constructed pictures is, today, increasingly constructing our social and political landscape. Constructing us, actually, by manipulating the mental spaces that we live in. Defining our Drishti – our perception and very sense of self ! There are, after all, more photographs shot every year than there are bricks in the world. And photography, in its different, camera lens based, avatars (film and television, for example) is what makes us what we are -who we are manufactured to be.

Cameras construct our worlds in ways that word oriented languages did not because the visual language they present us with is perceived to have credibility, a veracity and a connection to objective truth that words did not. Pictures are becoming the bricks that construct our contemporary, increasingly visual world. A world that can no longer just ban the making of pictures as it once did or tried to do. A world in which technologies drive the move away from the word driven and language riven cultures towards vast visual information landscapes that are increasingly becoming part of a real, war driven, information wars . Wars that are, says the Project for a New American Century, about Full Spectrum Domination.

Domination that is blatant about not allowing any challenges –‘military, economic or cultural”. Domination that seeks ‘control of all international commons including Space and Cyberspace, Culture not excluded’ and is driven by never ending wars that see whole societies as a battlefield. A battlefield where – in the language of the US Marines’ ‘Fourth generation Warfare’ – “ the action will occur concurrently- throughout all participants depth , including their society as a cultural and not just as physical entity”. Special Human Terrain teams now work alongside the American Armed Forces. These anthropologists, ethnographers etc are uniformed cultural warriors. They are, very problematically, working in battlefields to understand and subvert cultures and peoples. Humanity is now a terrain to be controlled.

It is against this background of militrarised information and cultural control that one needs to look at the Time magazine cover. It was its founder, after all, who first projected the idea of the 20th century as ‘An American Centrury’. Henry Luce founded a media empire to project his agenda. Time, Fortune, Life and even the March of Time film series served to mediate his synarchist ideas of corporate control of political power. That he was a member of Yale university’s secretive Skull and Bones society like so many other American leaders, only adds to ones suspicions of hidden agendas.

Interestingly enough, Luce first used the term ‘American Century’ in a publication that is iconic in its use of photography. The words appeared in a 1941, Life magazine editorial.

Born in China, (a country which has interesting links to both synarchism and the Skull and Bones Society) he was the son of an American missionary and wanted the United States to be more missionary in the global and universal projection of its power beyond its territories. Go beyond territorial control, into the control of ideas and ideologies

It is the fact that he foresaw the power of photography in doing that and foregrounded it in his publications that interests and intrigues me. I am not surprised that “Time’ _ the first Magazine he founded – is still used (and uses photography) to push the ideas of a New American Century promoted by 21st century synarchists like Dick Cheney . No Wikileaks, digital world, challenge to mainstream, corporate media is to be allowed, or go unchallenged . Not in these days of information wars and their clear cut ideas on ”Perception Management”.

The introduction in the August 9th issue of Time by the editor, Richard Stengel, makes it very clear that the magazine was aiming to counter the information leaked by Wikileaks on the uncontrollable net.

“The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.”

The cover photograph offers an insight, but it is an insight into the workings of corporate media. It is definitely not about any truth – emotional or otherwise. It is, for all practical purposes, a political poster that you pay for. The accompanying text about “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan” is a statement and not a question. It is a statement about staying on militarily, and it ignores the fact that Bibi Aisha’s mutilation occurred last year, at a time when the American led forces had been in the country for nearly nine years and with their own puppet government in place. Had intervened in, decades earlier, to actually create the Taliban. A government that hardly gives women any real space in the new Sharia ruled Islamic Republic that exists under American largesse. Reports by Afghan and womens’ human right groups actually show, from the times of the Taliban, an increase in the violence against women.
The cover photograph itself is a cynical attempt to photograph a desired future. It closely echoes the Steve McCurry photograph of another young Afghan girl on the cover of another American magazine. That ‘National Geographic’ cover represented the sad state of Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. This is one actually about life in Afghanistan after decades of American intervention and a decade of actual occupation.

Both the covers, interestingly enough, presented young and good looking women. Ones a western audience would be comfortable with. Ones the women in the west could connect with more easily. It is after all, they who are the actual targets of the propaganda. They and the lobbying they represent. Lobbying that is seen as necessary to keep the other international, partner armies in Afghanistan.

It is an earlier WikiLeaks document which makes that agenda clear. The CIA’s “Red Cell Special Memorandum: Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission- Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough” presents a plan for a propaganda war designed to shore up declining public support in Germany and France. Support for a continued war in Afghanistan.
The memo is classified as ‘Confidential/No Foreign Nationals’ and presents a well thought out plan for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in the two NATO ally countries. Winning hearts and minds! This time in Europe and in America.

The fall of the Dutch government on the issue of Dutch troops in Afghanistan, worried the CIA. They became worried about repeat events in the countries that have the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF mission and proposed PR strategies that focused on pressure points that had been identified within these countries. For France it was the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it was the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as Germany’s standing in NATO.

The CIA report had clear bullet points. Power points, actually! They are about reinforcing Power.
• “Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters”
• “…But Casualties Could Precipitate Backlash”
• “Tailoring Messaging Could Forestall or At Least Contain Backlash”

The CIA thought that “Appeals by President Obama and Afghan Women Might Gain Traction” and very clearly stated that “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission…

The ‘media opportunities for Afghan women’ became a simple oppurtunistic use of Afghan women. They and their bodies fitted seamlessly into the old orientalist discourses about western, humanising and civilizing missions. Missions meant to liberate oriental women them from their savage and cruel men. This is about white knights in shining steel or modern camouflage armour rescuing dusky, eastern damsels in eternal distress. Distress that photography was successfully used to stress in the beautifully lit and textured colour of a magazine cover reduced to a campaign poster for more war. More occupation of more oriental lands in the name of more oriental women. That the real prizes were and are natural resources is not worthy of mention except when those resources might be seen by a western audience, to pay for western wars.

Jodi Bieber did a great job – aesthetically speaking. The cover portrait could be a professional fashion shoot! And the mainstream media jumped in to push her and their own messages about the need to fight on. They asked no serious questions about how empathy the photograph evoked was used to promote antipathy. To promote more war and further the occupation of a suddenly mineral and oil rich Afghanistan. There were no questions about the price that the civilian population of Afghanistan, including women and children were paying in lives cut horribly short by wars that go on and on and seem to be designed to do just that in an unending war on a tactic that the weak use to resist stronger occupiers of their resource rich lands . Who is terrorising whom, one wonders. And why?

Two interviews with Bieber that I heard on BBC and CNN, were focused in foregrounding her as a now famous photographer. A South African photographer, now based in London she was projected as a white, concerned woman photographer empathising with her Afghan sisters even as she (and they, the media themselves) ignored the privacy concerns of her subjects – women for whom purdah may actually be more than just a dictate by the terrible Taliban. The women who had to continue living their lives in the very badlands of Afghanistan she was showing up as evil and dangerous.

I remember that ‘privacy concerns of victims’ were and are still used to prevent the release of photographs of tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. And even when the pictures were used the faces were carefully blurred out. That concern for privacy and the blurring to hide the identity of Bibi Aisha was not necessary for the Time cover, it seems. Dropping the family name while putting her on the cover of a magazine that sells millions of copies is no real attempt to protect her identity. Concern for the’ rights of victims’ matters when it might show up the ugly face of American occupation but doesn’t when it is the other side that is sought to be demonised. The real story of the mutilation is not important either. Later stories that checked out the Time story found that Aisha’s father in law had done the deed and then got a sanction for it from village elders. It had not been ordered by any Taliban Commander, as the Time story insisted.

Afghanistan becomes “ a broken 13th century country for the British Defense Secretary . A country full of “barbarians with 1200 AD mentality” for Erik Prince , the CEO of the infamous mercenary Blackwater ( now Xe) . What is wiped out of memory is shown by a collection of photographs from the Kabul of the mid 20th century. Recently republished in ‘Foreign Policy’ along with an essay by a Mohammed Qayoumi who lived there then, they present a conveniently forgotten Afghanistan. A country where women could wear western skirts and have bobbed haircuts as they attended universities and trained as doctors and nurses.

There is more to people than just the ugly western stereotypes the Time cover tries to reinforce and create anew. The freedom loving Mujhaideen heroes of the Soviet era are now Talibanised as barbaric terrorists. Terrorists cannot be “humanised” even in photographs that the world will see. I am reminded of the Red Cross photographs of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (wearing a white robe, sporting a long salt and pepper beard and sitting serenely) that were seen as dangerous by a former Research Director of the Combating Terrorism Centre in the US Military Academy at West Point. Jarret Barchman said ‘whats problematic for me is it (the Photograph) really humanises the guy”. The dangerous other is now not even supposed to be a human.

The history of photography, especially in American wars is an intriguing history. It is a story more mistold than told. It is a story of careful control. A control that began after the Vietnam war which, the Pentagon believes, was lost because of the freedom and unhindered access that photographers had in Vietnam and photographs got to the media at home. Since then, photographers and even journalists have a limited (if any) access to American battle fields. One is now embedded into an in-bed -with intimacy that makes dangerous disclosures difficult. Images that are released and printed go through a careful culling by self censoring photographers and the editors at home. Editors who act as censors and become the controllers of what the world is allowed to see. No dead bodies of American soldiers. Not even in flag draped coffins. Rights to privacy of dead soldiers and their families was the official Bush excuse when, actually, no one wanted a repeat of Mogadishu where pictures of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets had forced an American withdrawal.

I wonder at how easily photography is used as a political weapon even as the medium itself is denied any political space or purpose.
Photography after the Second World War and McCarthyism was consciously pushed into the sanitised spaces of art galleries and museums away from its past as a concerned, conscience pricking tool. We were told by institutional gate keepers like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that Photography was only about itself. It was an Art form that was about navel gazing photographers and about flattened formalist fields. Photography was not supposed to exist outside its own frame. It was not a medium that could be a window looking out on to the world’s uglier face – holding up a mirror to it. Photography was to be a mirror for a photographer to look into- see and explore his subjective self – express himself as an artist. An artist who never ever read what Roland Barthes says about one of the best ways of destroying the power of photography. Making it a Fine Art. But that is another story!

Related links:

The face that launched a thousand drones?

Once upon a time in Afghanistan

Sitting on a man’s back

The Face That Launched a Thousand Drones?

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By Anne Holmes

The much talked about August 9 Time magazine cover, unabashed in its aim to shore up support for the war effort in Afghanistan, has left many still shaking their heads in disbelief at such brazen exploitation of a woman’s suffering. It’s not the first time the plight of Afghan women has been used to manipulate public opinion. It’s a narrative we have become so accustomed to since the 2001 invasion, that many of my most intelligent female friends did not recognize it for the subversive emotional blackmail that it is. More important, they said, was the attention it brought to women’s issues. Well, let us talk about those issues in earnest, then.

The picture, by South African photographer Jodi Bieber, shows an 18-year old woman by the name of Bibi Aisha. Her story is tragic, and all too common in places like Afghanistan. Married off at a young age, she was beaten regularly by her in-laws and forced to sleep in the stable among the animals. Aisha decided to flee, but women wandering around on their own don’t go unnoticed in Afghanistan, and before long, she ended up in a prison in Kandahar. While not officially a crime, running away is often treated as such and can receive hefty sentences; in this case three years. But her father found her, and took her back to her in-laws. Her punishment for disgracing the family was decreed: her husband, A Taliban according to some accounts, should cut off her nose and ears. She was left for dead in the mountains of Oruzgan. As a testament to her fighter spirit, she managed to drag herself to her father’s house, who took her to a US Army hospital where she was cared for until they turned her over to a shelter in Kabul. This was 2009.

After an article about her ordeal appeared in the Daily Beast in December of last year, the Grossman Burn Foundation in California offered to perform reconstructive surgery on her this past spring, long before her face appeared on Time’s cover. She arrived in the US to begin treatment last week, just as her portrait appeared on newsstands amid the media frenzy surrounding the recent release of some 76,900 classified Afghan war documents. Perfect timing.

Aisha’s story will have a happy ending. America will have done right by her. She will get her nose back and hopefully go on to live a perfectly normal life far away from her abusers. It’s a heart-warming story. But what about the remaining 15 million Afghan women, nearly 90% of whom it is estimated suffer from some form of domestic abuse, and moreover, what does this have to do with America’s war?

Most people will never read the accompanying article in Time magazine. They will only see the disturbing gaze of a mutilated woman and the message scrawled beneath it “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan,” question mark excluded. Most will never examine the mechanisms within them that bring about the deep emotional response. Subliminal advertisers know all too well that a powerful image can make a target audience ignore the caption, all the while absorbing it subconsciously, reducing them to zombie-like consumers ready to do whatever the ad tells them to: buy this car, try this diet, sell your house, dye your hair, get a new phone, support our war. Using emotional triggers like scantily clad women in ads that sell anything from watches to hair-loss treatment, have proven effective time and time again. A strong image can be a thousand times more powerful than the words that accompany it, but words can manipulate the message of an image in far more virulent ways. The photograph alone is subject to interpretation. But in this case, the two combined, we are being sent a clear message that tells us this is what will happen if we leave Afghanistan. Who among us wants this to happen to another Afghan woman? Guilt is the precise emotional response that makes us suddenly feel that being against the war is somehow a travesty.

Setting aside the obvious (that this is what is happening now, today, on our watch) how can Time editor Rick Stengel be so sure of the future? “I think we answer questions. I don’t think we ask them,” Mr. Stengel said in an interview with Katie Couric when she pointed out the missing question mark at the end of the headline. It’s one thing to draw conclusions about questions that can actually be answered, like is there undeniable evidence that Bernie Madoff cheated lots of people out of money? It is another to predict the future of a foreign country at war, something analysts, historians and military advisors have been unable to do since time immemorial.

Mr. Stengel explained his editorial choice in the first pages of the magazine as follows: “What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents,” he said, referring to the recent release of leaked classified papers titledThe Afghan War Diaries by whistleblower website Wikileaks. The White House has been struggling desperately to convince the public that we can’t leave Afghanistan amid the fallout following the leak, a trove of documents that reveal the true horrors of the war campaign on the ground, and it seems Mr. Stengel decided to play steward to the Pentagon and help sway public opinion.

In his chosen message, two points of absurdity emerge: when in the history of mankind has a war ever been fought in the name of women’s rights, and how can one justify the murder and mutilation of thousands of innocents in the name of eradicating domestic abuse, never mind the fact that the Pentagon has no vested interest in the said cause. Countries don’t spend billions of dollars to mobilize troops to liberate women from the chains of institutionalized misogyny.

Why then, should we believe that saving the Aishas of Afghanistan is a just cause for war? It’s a narrative we have heard periodically for nine years, though never when it stood to benefit the women in question. In the lead up to the war, we were shown images of Afghan women being beaten and executed by the Taliban at Kabul’s infamous soccer stadium. Stories in the press abounded about the terrible living conditions of women under the Taliban, pulling on the heart strings of the typically more pacifist female demographic, and yet, nary a member of congress brought the matter to the floor prior to 2001. If it was really a just cause for mounting a full-scale invasion, it begs the most conspicuous question: why have we not done so in other parts of the world where our sisters are suffering too?

It’s the same ludicrous line we’ve been fed about wars in the name of democracy and freedom. We went in to Iraq to liberate the people from a terrible dictator. What we ended up doing is “liberating” well over 4 million people of life, limb, or home, ripping the country asunder, ushering in extremist factions that made some of the once secular nation’s women dress in the code of Hijab or wear a Burqa for the first time in their lives.

So why have we heard this line about the women every time proponents of the war seem to be dwindling? Because it works. Look no further for evidence than a recently leaked CIA document in March of this year, drawn up after the Dutch decided to pull out of the war. Amid fears that Germany and France, who supply the third and fourth largest contingents to Afghanistan, might follow suit, it suggests pushing stories about abused Afghan women to drum up support for the war:

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.

But women in Afghanistan suffer abuse at the hands of Talibs and non-Talibs alike. It’s a social problem, not a Taliban problem. Of course, ousting the Taliban did women a favour in many regards. They regained suffrage, for one. Yes, today women nearly fill the 25% quota for parliamentary seats, and education is no longer officially forbidden. But how many women really benefit from the new constitution? What is written on paper is rarely applied in practice for the vast majority of women, particularly those living in rural areas, which represent about 77% of the population.

According to a recent survey by the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), “more than 87 percent of all women suffer from domestic abuse, making the country one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman.” That is today. Are we to believe that 100% of women were being abused under the Taliban, or will be if they return to power? Is that meagre 13% of violence-free women really the result of the ISAF mission?

In 2007 I did a story on Afghan women who self-immolate. They are so desperate that, one day, something compels them to douse themselves with petrol and strike a match. I listened to their stories with unease. They were beaten, raped, used as prostitutes, molested and enslaved; all by husbands, fathers, cousins, uncles, brothers, or in-laws. Not one of them was from Taliban territory. Though it’s impossible to get a real sense of the numbers, most agree that the phenomenon is on the rise, and yet, we are meant to believe that the war effort is making progress on the front of women’s rights.

Oppression and brutality against women are not endemic to the Taliban alone in Afghanistan. Last year, President Karzai, in a bid to gain votes from the country’s Shia minority (roughly 19%) passed a controversial new law curtailing women’s rights. The Shiite Personal Status Law (SPSL), allows a man to deny his wife food if she does not submit to his sexual will, gives custody of children to fathers and grandfathers, and requires a woman to get permission from her family to work or to travel outside the home without a male escort. “It also, in effect, enables a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying ‘blood money’,” says Human Rights Watch.

It’s worth noting that the Taliban are Sunni, not Shia, and that the US-backed president has enacted a law for the non-Taliban sector of society, rolling back rights for women that were written into the constitution. Before the elections, the Times Online reported that “the United States and Britain [were] opposed to any strong public protest [against the law] because they fear[ed] that speaking out could disrupt [the] election.”  The bill was pushed through parliament in February of 2009 and came into effect in July of last year. Afghan women fumed, while US and UK leaders stood by, and where was Time’s cover advocating for women’s rights then? Here are the covers they ran in February 2009.

Central to the debate about the message the Time cover sends, is the question are we really making progress for women – and if so, why should we believe that a good reason to continue fighting? While many people were moved by the cover, some things just don’t add up. After nine years of war, the public has grown wary of these kinds of media stunts. We are not so dumb anymore. The Bush years are over. Challenging our leaders is no longer tantamount to a capital offence. Not “supporting the troops” is no longer suggestive of treason, since so many of them are returning home to join the growing anti-war movement. Support for the war has plunged to an all-time low (36%). Too many US soldiers have committed suicide or come home suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). People are starting to feel uncomfortable about the number of Afghan civilian casualties, which sadly should have been an issue long ago, but what the Wikileaks documents show us is that the army has been cooking the numbers. All those deaths of “enemy combatants” were in reality far too often civilians. Such facts Americans are not happy to learn. The truth is coming out, though the editors of Time, like the Pentagon, obviously want to deflect our attention from it by shoving our faces in another gruesome reality that somehow makes even the staunchest pacifist wonder if maybe we should soldier on.

In my discussions with friends about the cover, I was amazed how many educated, sharp women couldn’t see how they were being manipulated. Many felt it was much more important to shed light on the plight of women, and missed the absurdity of the message attached to it. Some of them were Iranian expats, for whom the subject of women’s rights is all too close to home. But then I asked, what if Time magazine were to run a cover like this one?

See full article:

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Bangladesh army’s advancing business interests

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The five star Dhaka Radisson hotel - which offers guests use of the nearby deluxe army golf course - is owned by the Bangladesh Army Welfare Trust (AWT) and was established on military land. © Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

By Kamal Ahmed

BBC News, Dhaka

The army is becoming increasingly involved in business activities. The Bangladeshi army has over the years played a key role in the country’s political life, but it has now also emerged as a major player in the business arena, with interests spread across all the major sectors of the economy.

Following the example of the Pakistan army, it has been thriving under successive civilian governments. But there are now signs of unease about it within the force itself and within wider society. Evidence of the army’s wealth and influence is not hard to find. The five star Dhaka Radisson hotel – which offers guests use of the nearby deluxe army golf course – is owned by the Bangladesh Army Welfare Trust (AWT) and was established on military land.

‘Commercial advantage’

There are five other top hotels in Dhaka, but none can provide a package that exploits military real estate.
The military’s interests include the hotel and hospitality trade. Capitalising on its success with the Dhaka Radisson, the AWT is now building another five-star hotel in the port city of Chittagong.

A leading hotelier who did not wish to be identified told the BBC that the use of cheaper military-land amid sky-rocketing land prices in Dhaka has given the army a clear commercial advantage against other players.

In addition to a recently-built fast-food shop aimed at the affluent middle class in Dhaka, the army’s other big business these days is the Trust Bank. Set up under civilian rule, it has now grown into a fully-fledged commercial bank with about 40 branches nationwide.

In 2007, the military-backed caretaker government granted it exclusive rights to receive fees for passports. Former senior civil servant Akbar Ali Khan says that this is against the government’s procurement rules – and there should have been an open tender to ensure that the cheapest and best passport service was selected.

The landfilling by the back of Sonargaon Hotel started during the recent caretaker government, which is considered to have been backed by the military. Little is known about such fills, but military vehicles are regularly seen plying the newly made roads and military trucks are parked there. © Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

Impropriety denied

While bank officials say it played by the rules and received no special favours from the government, its audited accounts – first released in 2007 – caused much controversy. They revealed that the-then army chief, Gen Moeen U Ahmed, got loans several times larger than the rules allow. The army’s business empire is thought to be worth around $500m. At the time, he was chairman of the Trust Bank by virtue of the fact that he was head of the army. And Bangladesh was being ruled by an army-backed interim government. Gen Ahmed denies any impropriety, arguing that questions over the size of the loan are an attempt “to malign” him.

And there are other parts of the forces which have their own banks. The Civil Defence Force runs the Bangladesh Ansar and Village Defence Party Bank – known as the Ansar VDP Bank. This bank, set up in 1995 by the government, has not yet received any banking licence and functions like a credit society.

But the army’s interests do not end here.

Ice cream sales

If you are buying any ice-cream in rural areas of the country, you may be getting a product of an army-owned business, that of the Sena Kallyan Sangstha (SKS). The SKS is a welfare foundation whose function is to care for the welfare of veterans and family members of servicemen. Among other things, the SKS now owns concerns in food, textiles, jute, garments, electronics, real estate and travel.

It is now evident that the Bangladeshi armed forces have been largely following the business model developed so successfully by their Pakistani counterparts. In Pakistan, the military’s Fauji Foundation has a huge involvement in trade and industry.

Using the Pakistani model, the AWT was founded in 1998 during the previous rule of the Awami League led by the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The irony is that military business interests have thrived more under civilian rule than under martial law regimes.

The growth of military involvement in commerce has had serious repercussions for the armed forces themselves. The official probe into the country’s worst ever mutiny by the paramilitary Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) border guards in 2009 – which left at least 68 high ranking military officials dead – bears this out.

Commission Chairman M Anisuzzaman Khan said that the mutiny was partly fuelled by resentment among the BDR’s rank-and-file over the corruption of army officers engaged in the retail sale of consumer items. It recommended that no forces – military or civil defence – should be allowed to engage in commercial or business activities. ”Law and order forces are meant for defending the country, they are not supposed to run factories or business units,” Mr Khan said.

Unease

But an empire worth at least $500m is growing daily and becoming stronger. Plans obtained by the BBC reveal that the army’s business ambitions include power plants and even the insurance businesses – no potential business sector seems out of its sights. Critics argue that the army should concentrate on serving the country. Although the army headquarters agreed to respond to the queries made by the BBC, our repeated requests for interviews did not materialise and no response was actually made. But a number of retired generals have expressed their unease over the army’s extensive exposure in the fields of trade and industry.

Lt Gen (Retired) Mahbubur Rahman – who entered politics few years back and served as the chairman of the standing committee on the Ministry of Defence in the previous parliament – told the BBC that the military “should keep within its charter of duties and not engage or get involved in any financial transactions – especially for business”. ”We have witnessed how such activities can bring disaster,” he said.

A number of leading figures in business and civil society have admitted that many army-owned businesses are virtually indistinguishable from other commercial enterprises in the way they operate. But as its ambitions develop, it seems that the debate about whether or not the army should engage in such activities will also grow.

Related article.

Moeen U Ahmed and Trust Bank

Viewer or voyeur? The morality of reportage photography

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Do you look away from images of real-life horror, or look closer? A series of shocking photographs from Somalia asks disturbing questions about the ethics of bearing witness

Sean O’Hagan

Monday 8 March 2010 14.23 GMT

Farah Abdi Warsameh's Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December. Photograph: AP

“To catch a death actually happening and embalm it for all time is something only cameras can do,” writes Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others, “and pictures taken out in the field of the moment of (or just before) death are among the most celebrated and often reproduced of war photographs.”

Sontag goes on to describe the context in which Eddie Adams took what was arguably the most shocking image of the Vietnam war: the moment in which a South Vietnamese police officer executes a Vietcong suspect by shooting him point-blank in the head. She points out that the picture was both authentic and staged – “by General Loan, who had led the prisoner, hands tied behind his back, out to the street where journalists had gathered. He would not have carried out the summary execution there had they not been available to witness it”. Wearily, Sontag concludes that “one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship”.

I was reminded of that final quotation when, a few weeks ago, I navigated the winner’s gallery of the World Press Photo of the Year website. There, amidst the many dramatic images of conflict, death and destruction, was a series by an Associated Press photographer, Farah Abdl Warsameh, entitled Stoned to Death, Somalia, 13 December. The four images are shocking in a way that even the most graphic war reportage seldom is any more. The first shows the victim being buried up to his neck in earth. The second shows a group of men, their faces concealed by headscarves, raining rocks down on his head. The third shows his bloodied torso being dragged out of the soil. The last shows the men hurling large rocks at his prone and lifeless body to finish off their gruesome ritual. There are no captions; we are left to guess the context.

One’s immediate instinct on coming upon the photographs is to recoil in horror, which is what almost everyone I showed them to did. A colleague described them as “a kind of pornography of suffering”. (The Sunday Times ran the series last week in their Spectrum section devoted to the World Press awards. Many readers were outraged and appalled.)

Last week, in a blogpost for Foto8 magazine, the veteran picture editor, Colin Jacobson, wrote that “the rather disgusting pictures … raised some interesting ethical matters”, which is one – somewhat understated – way of putting it. More problematically, Jacobson said that “obviously there was collaboration between the photographer and those carrying out this gruesome death sentence”. Perhaps. But what kind of collaboration? Unlike the shooting of the Vietcong suspect, the dreadful execution of the Somalian man would seemingly have gone ahead at that time had the photographer not been present. (Other images from the series, not included in the World Press selection, show an audience of villagers who had gathered to witness the execution.) On that level, the photographer did not collaborate with the killers, though he almost certainly gained permission from someone to shoot the stoning. He also shot every stage of the killing in all its protracted and torturous barbarity. What it takes to do that, and at what personal cost, only he can say.

Images as extreme as these beg so many questions about the morality of reportage. Did the photographer, one wonders, have any communication with the victim in the time leading up to the event? Would our reaction to the photographs be different if we knew that the condemned man granted the photographer permission to bear witness to his dreadful death? Would it be different if we knew that the photographer risked his own life to travel though strife-torn Somalia to bear witness, which, as one of the respondents to Jacobson’s blog points out, was probably the case. Does such extremity diminish us or enlighten us? Or simply shock us into a kind of impassioned helplessness?

Part of the complex power of these photographs comes from what Sontag calls the “provocation” inherent in all images of real suffering. The first of many questions they ask is: “Can you look at this?” Perhaps Sontag comes closest to articulating the moral dilemma at the heart of extreme images of suffering when she writes: “There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it … or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”

China Calls Our Bluff

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America’s biggest creditor – China – has called our bluff.

As the Financial Times notes, the head of China’s biggest credit rating agency has said America is insolvent and that U.S. credit ratings are a joke:

The head of China’s largest credit rating agency has slammed his western counterparts for causing the global financial crisis and said that as the world’s largest creditor nation China should have a bigger say in how governments and their debt are rated.

“The western rating agencies are politicised and highly ideological and they do not adhere to objective standards,” Guan Jianzhong, chairman of Dagong Global Credit Rating, told the Financial Times in an interview.

***

He specifically criticised the practice of “rating shopping” by companies who offer their business to the agency that provides the most favourable rating.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis “rating shopping” has been one of the key complaints from western regulators , who have heavily criticised the big three agencies for handing top ratings to mortgage-linked securities that turned toxic when the US housing market collapsed in 2007.

“The financial crisis was caused because rating agencies didn’t properly disclose risk and this brought the entire US financial system to the verge of collapse, causing huge damage to the US and its strategic interests,” Mr Guan said.

Recently, the rating agencies have been criticised for being too slow to downgrade some of the heavily indebted peripheral eurozone economies, most notably Spain, which still holds triple A ratings from Moody’s.

There is also a view among many investors that the agencies would shy away from withdrawing triple A ratings to countries such as the US and UK because of the political pressure that would bear down on them in the event of such actions.

Last week, privately-owned Dagong published its own sovereign credit ranking in what it said was a first for a non-western credit rating agency.

The results were very different from those published by Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, with China ranking higher than the United States, Britain, Japan, France and most other major economies, reflecting Dagong’s belief that China is more politically and economically stable than all of these countries.

Mr Guan said his company’s methodology has been developed over the last five years and reflects a more objective assessment of a government’s fiscal position, ability to govern, economic power, foreign reserves, debt burden and ability to create future wealth.

“The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation but the rating agencies still give it high rankings ,” Mr Guan said.

***

A wildly enthusiastic editorial published by Xinhua , China’s official state newswire, lauded Dagong’s report as a significant step toward breaking the monopoly of western rating agencies of which it said China has long been a “victim”.

“Compared with the US’ conquest of the world by means of force, Moody’s has controlled the world through its dominance in credit ratings,” the editorial said…

China is right. U.S. credit ratings have been less than worthless. And – in the real world – America should have been downgraded to junk. See this, this, this, this, this,this, this, this and this.

China is not shy about reminding the U.S. who’s got the biggest pockets. As the Financial Times quotes Mr. Guan:
“China is the biggest creditor nation in the world and with the rise and national rejuvenation of China we should have our say in how the credit risks of states are judged.”
Might Makes Right Economic Collapse

Indeed, Guan is even dissing America’s military prowess:
“Actually, the huge military expenditure of the US is not created by themselves but comes from borrowed money, which is not sustainable.”
As I’ve repeatedly shown, borrowing money to fund our huge military expenditures are – paradoxically – weakening our national security:

As I’ve previously pointed out, America’s military-industrial complex is ruining our economy.

And U.S. military and intelligence leaders say that the economic crisis is the biggest national security threat to the United States. See this, this and this.

[I]t is ironic that America’s huge military spending is what made us an empire … but our huge military is what is bankrupting us … thus destroying our status as an empire …

Indeed, as I pointed out in 2008:

So why hasn’t America’s credit rating been downgraded?

Well, a report by Moody’s in September states:

“In superficially similar circumstances, the ratings of Japan and some Scandinavian countries were downgraded in the 1990s.

***

For reasons that take their roots into the large size and wealth of the economy and, ultimately, the US military power, the US government faces very little liquidity risk — its debt remains a safe heaven. There is a large market for even a significant increase in debt issuance.”

So Japan and Scandinavia have wimpy militaries, so they got downgraded, but the U.S. has lots of bombs, so we don’t? In any event, American cannot remain a hyperpower if it is broke.

The fact that America spends more than the rest of the world combined on our military means that we can keep an artificially high credit rating. But ironically, all the money we’re spending on our military means that we become less and less credit-worthy … and that we’ll no longer be able to fund our military.

The Scary Part

I chatted with the head of a small investment brokerage about the China credit rating story.

Because he gives his clients very bullish, status quo advice, I assumed that he would say that China was wrong.

To my surprise, he simply responded:

They’re right. What’s scary is that China knows it.

In other words, everyone who pays any attention knows that we’re broke. What’s scary is that our biggest creditor knows it.

Tricks Up Their Sleeves?

China has been threatening for many months to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency (and see this). And China, Russia and other countries have made a lot of noises about replacing the dollar with the SDR. See this and this.

Gordon T. Long argues that the much talked about gold swaps are part and parcel of the plan to replace the dollar with the SDR. Time will tell if he’s right.

China, of course, is not without its own problems. See this and this.

In related news, Germany’s biggest companies are starting to shun Wall Street as too risky.

How can I speak out?

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As a Muslim I cannot take the easy path of a rousing condemnation of Israel

By Tabish Khair
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 17 January 2009 11.00 GMT

The statistics are clear: about 1,000 Palestinians, including more than 400 children and women, killed by Israeli forces in the first 20 days of the current misadventure in the Middle East.

Given these statistics, it should be easy to condemn Israel. But it is not. Not unless you are Jewish.

As a Muslim I cannot take the easy path of a rousing condemnation of Israel. Because I have to bear in mind not only Muslim experiences but also Jewish ones. I have to bear in mind not only Zionism but also Nazism. I have to bear in mind not just the duplicity of Israeli politicians but the stupidity of Muslim ones. If I were Jewish I could simply condemn Israel’s latest misadventure. If I were Jewish, I could choose to overlook my own, Jewish, contexts and focus instead on the rights and suffering of the other: of Muslim Palestinians. If I were Jewish, I could hardly do anything else – as a significant minority of Jewish intellectuals has demonstrated – without lying to myself about my own motives and twisting facts. But as a Muslim I cannot give myself the right to overlook the fears of the other: in this case, Israeli Jews.

I cannot deny the holocaust, as fact and fear. I will not deny the holocaust just to obstruct Zionism, for that would be to play into the hands of the odious racism of the European right, which led to Nazism. I want Palestinian Muslims to have a safe, viable state, but I will not win that state for them with the tacit or direct support of Nazism. All I can do is point out, as the Jewish leader Meir Ya’ari did, that Israeli leaders are using means of dispossession against Palestinians that bear a close resemblance to this earlier period in history. I will also not deny the right of Jews, in Israel or elsewhere, to be assured of life and property and human rights. For that is what I want for myself, and for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.

I will continue to speak up for the Palestinian people and support their struggle for a decent life, a viable state. But I do not want to use that for the sort of populist exercises that many Muslim, particularly Arab, leaders seem to be prone to. The missiles Hamas fires into Israel are of that nature. They are deplorable not only on humane grounds but also on strategic ones.

Arab leaders, being politicians with fragile popular bases, like to posture at times. Saddam did so most recently. When their bluff is called, it is the Arab people who suffer – as the Palestinian people are suffering right now. Just as Zionists take the support of Jews for granted, expecting them to justify every crime committed in the name of a Jewish homeland, many Muslim leaders take the solidarity of the Muslim “ummah” for granted. I refuse to let these leaders – Jewish or Muslim – take my support for granted. I refuse to suffer for them or let ordinary people – Muslim or Jewish – pay the price of their juvenile politics.

Above all, I refuse to subscribe to Biblical reasoning. It is this that has infected Muslims, Jews and Christians on all sides of the international tragedy of the Palestinians, sharing as they do the assumptions of Old Testament logic. God cursed the ancestor, and the present is a consequence of the curse, that legacy. Switch on any talk show and you find Jewish, Muslim and Christian (though sometimes they pretend to be secular) champions hammering at the details of the past, using them either to justify or condemn Israel or Palestine.

Well, God was wrong. The sins of the father cannot and should not be visited on the daughter. That is the main condition for sensible living in the present. History is there to learn from, not to justify or destroy the present. And hence, as a Muslim I take my stand only on the ground of the present: a present that should assure all human beings, including Palestinians, of basic human rights. I take my stand on hope that is not rooted in the deprivation of others.

The Pale Blue Dot

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By Carl Sagan

Seen from 6 billion kilometers away, Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right) within the darkness of deep space. The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a record distance (6 BILLION kilometers. In the meantime, Voyager is more than 16 billion kilometers -10 billion miles- away), showing it against the vastness of space. By request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the Voyager 1 spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space

Window to the soul

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A portrait they say, is not so much a likeness of the person being photographed, but a depiction of one’s character. More grand definitions talk of them being a ‘window to the soul’. I looked at my portrait of this ‘enemy of the country’ as a labour minister had declared, and wondered whether I had indeed found a window to her soul. She had just been arrested in Gazipur, and I had no further information.

Moshrefa Mishu secretary general of Ganatantrik Biplabi Party. © Shahidul Alam/Drik/Majority World

With numerous cases strategically lodged all over the country on trumped up charges, her arrest was always on the cards. In today’s countrywide strike for workers’ pay, facing violent repression, their resistance was a defiant stand for the rights of the oppressed. She and the workers she represented, all knew the risks. She had to lead from the front, come what may.

One is generally kind to bread winners. They are the ones who sit at the head of the table, get the choice piece of meat, make after dinner speeches. Their comfort and their happiness is of prime importance to those who survive on that bread. Bangladesh earns 12 billion dollars from garment exports and gets three quarters of its export earnings from this single sector. One would imagine that the bread winners of Bangladesh, the two million garment workers, mostly women who had migrated from villages in search of work, would be offered a bit more than the Taka 1650 (less than USD 24) per month minimum wage.

But then these enemies of the country, didn’t stop at demanding more than a dollar a day for their work. They wanted weekends off, to be paid overtime, to be paid on time and enjoy statutory holidays. They even objected to their systematized sexual harassment.

So what if the garment sector was the most profitable, and the garment workers amongst the most poorly paid. Some workers getting paid as little as $ 12 a month maybe a bit on the low side, and maternity leave should really be given, but have some sympathy for the owners. Should the BGMEA bigwig owner who bought his wife the expensive Mercedes have to sell his car? It’s not only workers who find Bangladesh a difficult country to live in. The Merc, as I’ve been told, had been expensive to start with. With 850% tax being applied on luxury goods, the poor man had to pay nearly a million dollars for his wife’s set of wheels. OK, so it could have paid for a few $24/month salaries, but then his wife had other costs. They did have standards to maintain.

And these strikes were so annoying. Even in May, the death of the 25 year old worker Rana, led to unrest. The Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) had to give up its normal task of extrajudicial killings to deal with workers demanding decent wages.

I just heard that the campaign worked. Mishu’s been released. I should get on with my portraits. Perhaps I should photograph the garment owners to complement the picture of Mishu. Given my earlier failure with portraits, I would need to find the right metaphors for the window to their soul. A chunk of granite, glued to cold steel, wrapped in dollars could perhaps do the trick.