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In the end the Bush presidency will be remembered best not for the feigned machismo of a man (who avoided service himself) playing dress up for the camera in a flight suit but for the naked exposure of evil itself through the image of 21 year old Lynndie England with a cowering Iraqi man on a leash. While the failures of Bush and his presidency are now apparent to all but the most hardcore extremists, the unforgettable photos of the Iraqi atrocities of torture, rape, and murder have awakened the heartland of America who now can clearly see that at the bottom of the pyramid of lies and deceit of an uncessary war are real people whose lives have been forever destroyed.

Fredric Koeppel of the Commercial Appeal examines the role photos have played in being the turning points of history as they become icons that change public opinions.    

Such a photograph can pierce hearts and change minds, lodge in memories. Such a photograph can bring consternation and conflict to an entire country and its government, as the images of physical and sexual humiliation and abuse from Abu Ghraib have done recently in America. Such a photograph can become an icon.

“The pictures are unforgettable . . . [that is] photography’s ultimate standard of value.”
- Susan Sontag, from “Where the Stress Falls.”

Robert Pugh, a licensed clinical social worker in private psychotherapeutic practice in Memphis, called it the “Lord of the Flies” factor, after William Golding’s novel of 1954 in which English schoolboys marooned on a desert island revert to savagery.

“First, these young soldiers are in a fearful, foreign social environment,” said Pugh. “They feel ungrounded, and they’re not given the external support of law, values and morality. Anyone who runs a prison should understand that about human nature. Power can corrupt.”

Pugh’s reasoning about the snapping of pictures during or after the humiliation and abuse, as if souvenirs were in order, is chilling.

“Throughout history, the military has socialized soldiers to believe that their enemies aren’t human. So these soldiers are thinking that it’s not really people they’re humiliating. The pictures they’re taking, with the soldiers grinning and waving, are like the pictures people take when they kill a deer or catch a big fish. Or it’s like in the South, when there were photographs of smiling white people around the lynching of a black man. There was a big postcard trade in those pictures. They were trophies of something nonhuman, just like the deer and the fish. It establishes domination.”

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