Torture?

There is much debate about the U.S. government torturing detainees, particularly as President Obama fights the release of photographs taken while detainees were questioned - sometimes quite aggressively. But really, is this torture?

Shocking images of inmates in Iraq are the kind of images whose release the president has now vowed to fight in court....

Others yet to be released reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps.

Seems pretty clear that water boarding is torture. It is not at all nice. But prisoners being forced to wear a hood for transportation with "Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps"? They can't even see the magazines? Where's the torture?

And how does a photograph "show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick"? Maybe the guards are saying "if you don't sweep the floor of your room you're not getting any punch and pie!" It's not possible to tell what a photograph shows except for a moment frozen in time.

To be fair, the article does mention some pictures which show what might be, at their most extreme, torture:

One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.

Certainly not nice. But is it torture? Depends on a lot of things the photographs do not show us, namely context. All photographs lack context. Take this most famous example:

This is a photograph that "changed the course of the war in Vietnam." But what does it not tell you? It doesn't tell you that the man being shot was a Viet Cong operative: "most reports give him the role of a Captain in a Viet Cong assassination and revenge platoon responsible for the killing of South Vietnamese policemen and their families."

So what are the soon to be released "torture" pictures also not going to tell us?

In the words of Eddie Adams: "I won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for a photograph of one man shooting another... The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation."