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Hundreds of photojournalists covered the conflict in
Iraq, but the most memorable image from the war was
taken not by a professional but by a U.S. Army staff ser-
geant named Ivan Frederick. In the last three months of
2003, Frederick was the senior enlisted man at Abu Ghraib
prison, the facility on the outskirts of Baghdad that Saddam
Hussein had made into a symbol of terror for all Iraqis, then
being used by the U.S. military as a detention center for sus-
pected insurgents. Even before the Iraq War began, many
questioned the motives of the American, British and allied
governments for the invasion that toppled Saddam. But
nothing undermined the allies’ claim that they were help-
ing bring democracy to the country more than the scandal
at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was one of several soldiers who
took part in the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
All the more incredible was that they took thousands of
images of their mistreatment, humiliation and torture of
detainees with digital cameras and shared the photographs.
The most widely disseminated was “the Hooded Man,”
partly because it was less explicit than many of the others
and so could more easily appear in mainstream publica-
tions. The man with outstretched arms in the photograph
was deprived of his sight, his clothes, his dignity and, with
electric wires, his sense of personal safety. And his pose? It
seemed deliberately, unnervingly Christlike. The liberating
invaders, it seemed, held nothing sacred.