biressi nunn war body on screen

PART FOUR

The Body of the Hostage

Introduction

Karen Randell

Figure 1. Torture of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison (http://

urbansemiotic.com/tag/policy)

On April 12, 2007, a group of journalists gathered in Trafalgar Square, London,

to mark the anniversary of, and to protest at, the kidnapping of the BBC corre-

spondent Alan Johnson on March 12, 2007. Giant pictures of Johnson hung in

the square as a reminder of the loss but also as a means of ownership of Johnson,

as a means to care about one man whose life few really knew about on March

11, 2007. Photographs, as Susan Sontag reminds us, objectify: they turn an event

or a person into something that can be possessed (2003, 72). The face of Alan

Johnson has now become the face of the hostage in Britain: symbolic of loss and

symbolic of our powerlessness to do anything. Johnson, whose job it was to bring

the BBC day after day reports of the Palestinian Predicament in the Gaza

Strip (BBC 2007a) was abducted in the street on his was way home from work

in Gaza City. In early May a tape was released by his alleged kidnapers, a group

called Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) showing not Johnson but his BBC pass,

presumably his only ID on the day, but also a symbol of the British institution,

of a history of imperialist power.

217

Johnson was literally absent. His AWOL status prompted marches, petitions,

special BBC Radio programsone in particular From Our Own Correspon-

dent renamed To Our Own Correspondent aired on BBC Radio 4 and the

World Service on May 17, in the hopes that Johnson could access it and know

that he was being cared for in his familys and colleagues thoughts. Vigils were

held to commemorate his forty-fifth birthday on May 17, and over a hundred

thousand people worldwide signed a BBC-organized petition urging that he be

freed. With ironic timing, Johnson was kidnapped a few weeks before his stint

in Gaza was finished; he began as correspondent there in April 2004. Like a

Vietnam soldier, Johnson was just short on his tour. He was missing for 114 days

and then released on July 4, to worldwide rejoicing, ending what his father called

a living nightmare. Johnson said that his ordeal was like being buried alive

but that it was fantastic to be free (BBC 2007b).

Our mental image of the AWOL soldier during the Vietnam War, missing in

service, has created a precedent for the ways in which we deal with the terrifying

impotence of absence. It is useful to consider that precedent for us to understand

our reactions now: to understand our need for information, the countless Web

sites, news broadcasts, poster-size pictures in the West End, London.

In 1968 anxiety was high in the USA with regard to the men listed as missing

in Vietnam. The campaign for the return of Prisoners of War (POWs) and

recognition of the men missing in action (MIA) had gained impetus:

Defense and State Department officials are not even certain how many

prisoners are being held by North Vietnam. About 800 fliers have been

shot down since the war began. . . . Estimates of those who might still be

alive range from 300 to 600. . . . Letters have been received from fewer

than a hundred prisoners; Hanoi broadcasts over the years have either

named or carried voices of others, permitting tentative identification of

about 200 altogether. Visitors to North Vietnam have seen or interviewed

some of these prisoners, but apparently the same group is made available

for each public display. (Grose 1968)

By about 1967 in the USA, wives and mothers of missing men established the

National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast

Asia. This group continually campaigned for information about the men and

worked actively with the Department of Defense. The campaign included inter-

views with newspapers and television and the public posting of lists of names

and photographs of those missing, to keep their plight in the focus of the political

forum. At campaign rallies the cry was always, Remember the MIAs. This was

an inclusive protest group: whether officially documented as MIAs or as POWs,

both sets of men were Missing. Newspaper reports such as the one below

demonstrate the way in which this issue was considered, in 1968, to be one of

solidarity within America (Davis 2000, 533) It was considered to be an issue that

both those on the political right and those on the political left agreed:

The Body of the Hostage218

The United States appeal to members of the United Nations to put

pressure on North Vietnamese to lift its secrecy on American Prisoners

of War represents one aspect of Vietnam policy on which virtually all

Americans are united. . . . Hanoi persists in flouting civilized practice and

procedures by continuing to ignore the humanitarian obligations it

assumed when it signed the Geneva conventions on war prisoners in 1957.

(New York Times 1968)

Families of the missing men campaigned to keep their identities in high profile

and continually lobbied the government for information and action. In 1969 the

Go Public Campaign by the United States Government was initiated to raise

their profile yet higher, in the international political arena, to encourage the

North Vietnamese to release the men held as prisoners. Vernon E. Davis has

suggested that this campaign was developed as much to alleviate the anxieties of

the families of the missing or held men as it was to put pressure on Hanoi to

release the men held (2000, 533). This is a pertinent issue too.

Articles appeared on the BBC Web site charting Alan Johnsons life and suc-

cesses; they read like obituaries, even though that is not the intention. What is

the intention? How does it help Johnson for us to know, for instance, that he

received an MA from Dundee University? Web visitors are invited to look at the

time line of disappearance or to use your blog to support Alan Johnson.

Keeping this activity going kept Johnson alive in the hearts and imaginations of

his family and indeed the nation. It enabled an active participation in some-

thing that is utterly beyond our controlthe actions of insurgents, the acts

of terrorism.

In the first chapter of part 4, The Body of the Hostage, Heather Nunn and

Anita Biressis chapter, The Kidnapped Body and Precarious Life: Reflections

on the Kenneth Bigley Case, takes as its focus the media coverage surrounding

Kenneth Bigleys kidnapping (in October 2004); it explores the representation

of the vulnerable and terrorized body. This chapter reflects on the intense media

coverage surrounding Kenneth Bigleys kidnapping in Iraq in October 2004 in

order to raise questions about the representation of the vulnerable body and the

ways in which it can accrue collective meaning and emotional investment in the

information age. It will consider how the media treatment of the kidnapped body

has helped to articulate and shape the contradictory, lived experience of global

and local vulnerabilitya vulnerability that is an unavoidable dimension of po-

litical and social life. The Bigley case is also a point of entry into a broader

exploration of the mediated experience of the kidnapped/hostage body as one of

the ways in which the media, politicians, and the public talk through the pre-

cariousness of life, vulnerability, and risk in the contemporary age. They argue

that the kidnapped body, its hidden location, and increasing media presence

foreground questions of (dis)locatedness and the geopolitical distribution of

bodily vulnerability, all within the globalized context of the war against terror.

Introduction 219

This media climate stimulates audiences to make a significant collective emo-

tional investment.

Nunn and Biressi argue that the resulting referential instability is central

to the political and emotional currency that the mediated image holds over its

various audiences. Drawing on critical work on the imprisoned body and the

body in pain, this chapter considers how the kidnapped body opens up crucial

contemporary questions about the constitution of the publicly endorsed griev-

able body (Scarry 1985; Butler 2004). The body, they argue, may never have

seemed as vulnerable as it does in our global age.

Rinella Cere places her discussion of the kidnapped body within an exami-

nation of gender politics. Her chapter The Body of the Woman Hostage:

Spectacular Bodies and Berlusconis Media engages in a detailed study of news-

paper and TV coverage. Cere argues that the representation of Italian women

captured in Iraq in September 2004 underlines a gender bias in the Italian pop-

ular media, where the body of the woman is consistently placed as spectacle. Her

argument considers the spectacularization of the female body in the case of two

young women hostages (Simona Pari and Simona Torretta), the gender/age-

biased reporting in connection with two older women hostages (Giuliana Sgrena

and Florence Aubenas), and the impossibility of spectacle when the womans

body is damaged, different, or other. The third theme discusses ways in which

women hostages are divided and separated from their non-Western counterpart

through the symbol of the veil and consequently reappropriated into the ide-

ology of the just war. The body of the hostage normally seen and represented

in pain and psychologically crushed was never part of the story of the two Italian

women hostages, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta; theirs were sanitized and

beautiful bodies, hardly consonant with their status of hostage. The spectacle,

Cere argues, is privileged over the political, pushing the narrative of kidnap to

the margins of the story.

Andrew Hills chapter, Hostage Videos in the War on Terror, thinks

through the morbid fascination of audiences with death and torture through an

analysis of the audience reaction to the Iraq hostage videos and the images taken

during the torture of the Abu Ghraib prisoners. It focuses on the type of fears

generated among the public by the hostage videos, fears that are juxtaposed with

the, what at first glance may appear to be, contradictory desires to view this

footage, including that showing the execution of certain hostages. Hill seeks to

locate these videos in dialogue with the images of U.S. service personnel torturing

and humiliating detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, which came to light in the

spring of 2004. In addressing these themes, Hill takes Lacans workin particular

its concerns with questions of seeing and questions of ontologyas a central

point of reference, above all in regard to the insights it offers into the terms in

which suffering, death, and the Truth are perceived at a visual level. Drawing

on Kristevas discussion of Holbeins painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the

Tomb, this chapter engages with a theme identified by all the authors in this part:


that the demand to view these images can be situated in terms of the desire to

witness death in a Western culture, in which real deaths are rarely seen.

Works Cited

BBC News 24. 2007a. Fears for BBC Gaza Correspondent. March 12, http://news.bbc.co.uk/

1/hi/world/middle_east/6442663.stm (accessed July 31, 2007).

BBC News 24. 2007b. BBCs Alan Johnson Is Released. July 4, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/

world/middle_east/6267928.stm (accessed July 31, 2007).

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: the Power of Mourning and Violence. London. Verso.

Davis, Vernon E. 2000. The Long Road Home: U.S. Prisoner of War Policy and Planning in South-

east Asia. Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Grose, Peter. 1968. U.S. May Ask Hanoi Price for Freeing War Captives. June 20 (Prisoners

of War clipping file. Center for American History. University of Texas at Austin).

Scary, E. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford

University Press.

New York Times. 1968. A United Appeal on Vietnam. New York Times, November 15 (Prisoners

of War clipping file. Center for American History. University of Texas at Austin).

Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin Books.

Introduction 221

13

The Kidnapped Body andPrecarious Life

Reflections on the Kenneth Bigley Case

Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi

This chapter reflects on the intense media coverage surrounding Kenneth

Bigleys kidnapping in Iraq in October 2004. We raise questions about the rep-

resentation of the vulnerable body and the ways in which it can accrue collective

meaning and emotional investment in the information age. We will consider

how the media treatment of the kidnapped body has helped articulate and shape

the contradictory, lived experience of global and local vulnerabilitya vulner-

ability that is an unavoidable dimension of political and social life. The Bigley

case is also a point of entry into a broader exploration of the mediated experience

of the kidnapped/hostage body as one of the ways in which the media, politicians,

and the public talk through the precariousness of life, vulnerability, and risk in

the contemporary age. We argue that the kidnapped body, its hidden location,

and increasing media presence foreground questions of (dis)locatedness and the

geopolitical distribution of bodily vulnerability within the globalized context of

the war against terror. This media climate stimulates audiences to make a

significant collective emotional investment.

On the September 16, 2004, gunmen seized Briton Kenneth Bigley, together

with two colleagues, during a dawn raid in central Baghdad. Bigleys colleagues

Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley died within a day of each other on

September 20 and 21. Images of the beheading of Armstrong were posted on an

Islamic Web site, and those of Hensley soon followed. The British expatriate civil

engineer outlived them by several weeks: his death was confirmed on October 8.

During his time in captivity, he was to appear on three videos; Al Jazeera broad-

cast the first two, in which he pleaded with the British government to meet the

kidnappers demands and save his life. The final tape showing his beheading was

sent to Abu Dhabi television, which declined to use it. It was made available on

the Web and via still photography. The case was at the center of British national

media attention for two months; its centrality was secured by the circulation of

images in the national and international news media and by the media visibility

222

of the Bigley family. Kenneth Bigleys recorded pleas arguably had as much im-

pact on the public imagination as the frequently reproduced still images showing

him in such degrading circumstances. For example, the second broadcast on

September 29 showed him chained, trussed, and in a cage, reminiscent of those

used at Guantanamo Bay. Here he pleaded, Im begging you Mr. Blair. Im

begging you to speak, to push.

The final tape, circulated on the Internet on October 10, lasted about four

minutes. It showed Bigley crouching on the floor and surrounded by his

captors. He addressed Tony Blair directly in a short speech that we only partly

reproduce here:

Here I am again, Mr. Blair and your Government, very, very close to the

end of my life. You dont appear to have done anything to help me. . . . I

am a simple man who just wants to live a simple life with his family. These

people, their patience is wearing very, very thin. . . . Please, please give

them what they require. [AU: Please identify source.]

After one of the kidnappers speaks to camera, Kenneth Bigley is held down and

decapitated with a knife. His head is held aloft in celebration and then placed on

his corpse. The broadcasts could not prompt a mass-mediated dialogue of any

meaningfulness between the captors and their political enemies. But they did,

inadvertently perhaps and certainly painfully, prompt some dialogue between

the Blair administration and the Bigley familymembers of which, as we shall

see later, became nascent political actors despite being nonelites within the

frameworks of political journalism and political action.

The media coverage of these events in Britain was phenomenal in its inten-

sity.1 And within an international context, Kenneth Bigleys predicament

involved a wide range of elite political actors such as Tony Blair, Jack Straw,

Yassar Arafat, Gerry Adams, Bertie Ahern, and Muammar Gaddafi. Bigleyscapture and, more important, his forced public statements demanded public

responses from some of these high-profile persons, if not always public inter-

vention. The Bigley family also became prominent in the media, trying to usewhat leverage it had to appeal to anyone who potentially had influence over the

hostage-takers, rejecting Foreign Office advice to avoid the television cameras.

Much of the Bigleys campaign was coordinated by Kenneths younger brother,Paul, from his home in Amsterdam. He organized appeals on Arabic satellite

channels that the kidnappers were said to watch. At the familys prompting, 150

thousand leaflets with a personal appeal from the family were distributed in theareas where Bigley might be held, aimed not at convincing the militants to let

him go, but at undercutting any support they might have in the community

(Whitaker 2004). A familial link to Ireland (Bigleys mother was born in Ireland)produced an Irish passport from the government in absentia, and some thought

it might be enough to deflect the kidnappers into releasing their captive, as

Ireland had not been part of the 2003 invasion. Paul Bigley appealed via Irish

The Kidnapped Body and Precarious Life 223

newspapers for the Dublin government to get involved, and Irish Prime

Minister Bertie Aherne made a strong appeal to the kidnappers via Al Jazeera for

Bigleys release.

In addition, various members of the family both pleaded and challenged the

government directly to do something to resolve the situation. Brother Philip

expressed his frustration and powerlessness by moving from referring to Blair in

the third person toward direct address. Philip Bigley declared, We are not

politicians. He is the political head of our country. It is the Prime Minister who

has the power to save Kenneths life. Prime Minister, we as a family are begging

you, please help us (Whitaker 2004, 45). In a well-publicized telephone ex-

change between Kenneth Bigleys 86-year-old mother and Blair, Elizabeth

begged the prime minister to help her son, claiming his ordinariness as a working

family man. Paul Bigley was the most vocal in confronting the Blair government,

not only over its handling of the kidnapping but ultimately also over its original

decision to go to war in Iraq. On September 26 he received a standing ovation

and wide media coverage for his speech by videophone to a fringe meeting at the

Labour Party Conference. In early October he used the media to call on the public

to join the Stop the War march in London later in the month: For Kenneths

sake and for the sake of everyone in Iraq, I ask you to make your feelings known

to our Government, to protest and to join the demonstration in London. The

more people raise their voices, the safer we will be (Press Association News,

October 6, 2004).

On October 8, 2004, following news of his brothers execution, Paul Bigley

addressed a Stop the War Coalition meeting in Liverpool by telephone link, being

joined by Rose Gentle, mother of Gordon Gentle, a teenage soldier killed on duty

in Iraq earlier that year; and Azmat Begg, father of the Guantanamo Bay prisoner

Moazzam Begg. These figures, joined together, highlighted how the war against

terror seemed to know no boundaries, damaging British teenage soldiers,

unlawful combatants, and innocent bystanders alike.2 Paul situated his per-sonal grief within the broader context of political protest, begging for the war to

be stopped before other lives were lost, and stating that the war was illegal and

that Blair had blood on his hands. National and regional newspaperssuchas the Liverpool Daily Echo, the Mirror, and Independentechoed Paul Bigleys

charge by including the voices of ordinary Liverpudlians expressing their anger

and resentment at Blair and Jack Straw for their ineffective strategies. Theseinclusions are illustrative of the scope within British media debate for the par-

ticipation of nonelite voices and the fissures that they reveal in the sociopolitical

realm in which, as hegemonic representations would contend, we are allbonded in the war against terror and in a necessary alliance through the

conflict in Iraq itself.

We argue that first and foremost, the English language media coverage of thekidnapping was notable for its inclusion of ordinary people as temporary political

actors and as people with an investment in the events taking place in the Middle

East (Cottle 2000, 31). The events acted as a sharp reminder to British nationals


of their increased vulnerability as global citizens who may travel or work abroad.

Mr. Bigleys relatives and friends and the broader community from which he

originated gained access to media platforms, their opinions were aired, and their

concerns apparently taken seriously by political elites. Invited to speak at press

conferences, at party political events, and for international news, the Bigley fam-

ily momentarily became a participant in a political arena as well as the object of

media spectacle. Their often highly vocal media contributions (amplified by local

and national presses) countered government rhetoric. Paul Bigley, at least,

worked hard to suggest that his brothers predicament should be regarded as

emblematic of the failure of both political rhetoric and government policy.

Although some commentators may regard the media spotlight on the Bigley

family as voyeuristic and excessive, others have suggested that in fact, the family

members were consummate media managers, who effectively ensured that the

case remained in the headlines and that the Blair government was forced to enter

into dialogue with its members, not only about the case itself but also about the

broader issue of the failure to secure a national consensus about British involve-

ment in Iraq. Newsmakers have observed that laypeople are quick to grasp the

power and importance of the media in shaping a campaign or an argument. Guy

Kerr, the chief operating officer for British Channel 4 news, for example, com-

mented on the incredible success that the family had in raising its media profile

and keeping the story alive via what were often very subtle interventions. The

family ensured that journalists felt at liberty to report the moment at a press

conference when Elizabeth Bigley collapsed and had to be helped away (via Vass

2004). This moment of high drama was one of many that included family mem-

bers such as Kenneth Bigleys mother and his wife appealing directly to political

elites, kidnappers, and other people of influence. The judicious use of press con-

ferences, the release of home video footage of Bigley in happier days, and other

kinds of media management all helped to give the news story longevity.

This coverage occurred in the context of a new media landscape, in Brian

McNairs words (2005, 151) an environment of communicative turbulence

a cultural chaos brought into being by the proliferation of media channels and

the volume of information of all kinds which flows up, down and through them.

And central to this cultural chaos is the globalization of the media and the

development of new technologies and multimedia platforms. Although it can be

said that globalization is as old as capitalism itself, in recent years many media

critics agree that globalization has intensified and that this intensification has led

to the unraveling of long-held certainties and relationships of trust between cit-

izens and the power elites of the nation-state. One by-product of this diminution

in trust is a skeptical reception toward the truth claims of media experts. The

authority invested in the journalist as informant and representative of the citizen

has been under attack for some time as journalists experience the effects of

broader public disenchantment with truth providers. In this context the opin-

ions of the Bigley family as lay experts were received with interest and were

circulated widely.


The Bigley familys media prominence is also characteristic of the shift in the

location of the political arena and in political communications to one in which

the media have become the main political theater, staging political dialogues and

brokering events (Seaton 1998, 1). Observers often assume that this new space

is detrimental to democratic politics and rational debate because of its affiliation

with political spectacle and a culture of exhibitionism, emotional incontinence,

human interest stories, and tabloid news values. So too some have argued that

this present state of political journalism has exacerbated political disenfran-

chisement by moving away from informative reportage and toward politics as

entertainment and diversion (Sparks 1988, 211). In this context yet from another

perspective, one could also argue, however, that the human-interest story has

also provided a platform for ordinary citizens to speak their mind, allowing

laypeople to enter into mediated political discourse. The Bigley story is a classic

human-interest story, as John Taylor has observed:

Human interest favours the random forces of luck, fate and chance

worked out on the bodies of isolated discrete individuals in a naturalised

taken-for-granted world. This given world is understood to be stable in

its deeper structures but prone to local, surface turbulence and

fragmentation. (1998, 89)

The just-outlined factors sustained the publics fascination with the case and

allowed the Bigley family a continuing voice. As Simon Cottle (2000) has argued,

the media can offer a key opportunity for the ordinary person to enter the world

of public political discourse. In Cottles own work about laypeople in the news,

he suggests that lay campaigners appeals can gain credence by their mustering

of lived experience, familial relationships, everyday concerns, and emotions (31),

and the media can provide an important arena where a form of social ratio-

nality can challenge scientific rationality (3132), or in this case political

rationality. Here Cottle draws on Ulrich Becks (1992) definition of laypeople in

the media as the voices of the side effects, where news coverage concentrates

on the voice of ordinary victims of governmental or scientific failure, sym-

bolizing the human face and consequences of manufactured risk. Regarding

the expertise of lay people, Beck appositely observes, On their side of the fence,

side effects have voices, faces, ears and tears. . . . Therefore people themselves

become small, private alternative experts in risks of modernization (Beck 1992,

in Cottle 2000, 30). One could argue that the Bigley family became increasingly

vocal and skilled in articulating the risks of global citizenship in the context of

the War against Terror and lending them a human aspect that would resonate

emotionally with localized Western audiences.


The Power of the Image

Central to the impact and continuous heavy coverage of the events in Baghdad

were the video images produced by the kidnappers and distributed and circulated

by the mass media. As reported above, Mr. Bigleys predicament (and others like

it) was transmitted around the world and claimed audience attention not only

through written and spoken reportage, but also through the circulation of video

footage and stark photographic stills produced by the kidnappers, which

arguably took on iconographic status. In these images Kenneth Bigley was bound

and surrounded by his captors, or chained and trussed in a cage (reminiscent of

images of those held at Guantanamo Bay), forced to address the camera and plea

for help, and finally killed on camera. Central here is the referential instability

of the images of the kidnapped body. The kidnapped body can be used for pro-

paganda, its vulnerability and imminent death transposed into portraits of the

victim marshaled for political rhetoric about the inhumanity of the enemy (both

by kidnappers and government officials) and the impossibility of compromised

intervention. The knowing symbolism used by the kidnappers here certainly

seems to validate political theorist John Grays (2003) analysis of radical Islam

today as exhibiting a complicated and intimate inversion of political values and

strategies of dominant Western political formations in violent acts tailored for

mass-mediated transmission (also Slocum 2005, 34). The Bigley case was dis-

sected in the British media as one that offered insights into how individual

trauma can be deployed for propaganda purposes and also as a prompt in

expanding the ongoing public political dialogue on the War against Terror. This

footage (video images of the kidnapped body) was regarded variously as a vehicle

of propaganda and evidence, defiance and insult. Its circulation was also arguably

the medium and trigger for a mutation in the complex formation of political

communication that included in its network kidnappers, hostages, their relatives,

and their wider community, journalists and politicians.

Furthermore, these images raised broader debates by journalists and editors

on the ethical professional dilemmas of circulating occurrences of violence cat-

egorized as terrorism. Since the 1970s media representations of alleged terrorism

have faced charges of complicity as they frame and constitute the popular imag-

ination of violence in the press, on screen, and in broader fictionalized forms

(McAlister 2005, 151). In 1984, the Second International Conference on terror-

ism held at Washington served as the primary source for a widely debated forum

in Harpers magazine that brought together some of the most prominent jour-

nalists to consider the responsibility of the news media in reporting alleged

terrorist events. Harpers contended that in recent years the development of the

terrorist theater had become a staged performance of violence, with the per-

petrator as the master of ceremonies at a media spectacle (McAlister 2005,

151): such notions of the perilous but inevitably close-knit relationship between

mainstream media, violence, and representation have in subsequent years been

intimately tied to public discourses on hostage stories. Although a range of public


figuresthe terrorism risk expert, the policy maker, the politician, and the

psychological profilerare mustered to comment on hostage events, the role of

family, friends, and colleagues of those kidnapped is frequently to provide an

emotional touchstone and point of identification.

Senior media professionals recalled that they had to grapple with the powerful

emotional and visual nature of the videos, in particular in the context of a

24-hour global news culture. The images were presumably released as part of the

terrorist arsenal of media propaganda and as a weapon of war, which jour-

nalist should be wary of further circulating. But at the same time newsmakers

could justify their circulation as being both newsworthy and in the public inter-

est. After all, family members and the populist press claimed the Bigley kidnap-

ping as somehow emblematic of the failure of British foreign policy, and that

Kenneth Bigley was a body that did not elect to die for his country or for a political

cause; this became the trajectory of much (but not all) of the media coverage in

the UK.3 The meanings accrued to the Bigley case were variable but gradually

stabilized as he became a figure of national importance; his graphically depicted

distress and literal imprisonment symbolized the growing realization that allcitizens post 9/11 are subject to risk, being made vulnerable to global forces

outside the control or influence of power elites. As Edward Pilkington, home

editor of the Guardian newspaper, commented that discussions among hiseditorial team concluded, Its one persons story set against a situation where

people in Iraq are dying every day. But most editors accepted that it was such an

extraordinary emotional tale and has become so politically important [that] asa result there is no holding back (Sunday Herald 2004, 36).

The images of Bigley were doubly loaded as captured images: first, he was

literally captured, an ordinary civilian caught up in a politically motivatedconflict, imprisoned, and used as a pawn in a political stratagem. Second, his

captured image on screen came to convey, throughout his captivity and finally

in a horribly visceral way via his death, the extreme reality of suffering and im-minent risk in an area rift by conflictan area in which the military prohibition

of violent images on the part of the U.S. and British states had arguably circum-

scribed public knowledge of the conflict and its human implications. KennethBigleys sudden, and from his perspective unplanned, media appearances in

degrading conditions were in more than one sense publicly embarrassing; they

bound together the public political statement or challenge formulated by thekidnappers and the filmic exposure of an individual humiliation, which is an

essentially private and intensely personal experience. This literal exposure of

Bigley in all of his vulnerability as both an ordinary person and as a citizen of astate engaged in the War against Terror inspired ethical questions not only about

aiding terrorist propaganda but also about the diminution of human dignity

entailed in showing these images without Kenneth Bigleys own consent.4

The images also constituted a disturbing inversion of the (Western) world

order as the kidnappers video releases dictated the pace of events and their cov-

erage. If, as Judith Butler (2004b, 148) argues, the shock-and-awe strategies of


the USA, for example, were one way to exploit and instrumentalize the visual

aesthetics as a part of the war strategy, then the kidnappers mobilization of

these images of Bigleys incarceration and death could be viewed as the equally

disturbing underside of that state strategy. They were, as the best of journalistic

images of the effects of war can be, a disruption of the hegemonic field of rep-

resentation (150). For these traumatic events (at the same time, media events)

arguably returned not only the Iraqi conflict to the center of the electoral agenda

but also to the origins of the conflict. In Britain the media visibility of Mr. Bigley

and his Al-Tauhid and Jihad kidnappers ensured the return of certain home

truths to domestic table talk: many in Britain had not condoned the war, and

they continued to be concerned about its lack of resolution. The bedrock of this

attitude was arguably founded on the precariousness and vulnerability of the

ordinary citizen; Kenneth Bigleys face staring from the screen and newspaper

page was emblematic of what it is to be human and therefore vulnerable in the

context of the risks of military intervention. These images seemed to capture

both the precariousness of life post 9/11 and the immanence of risk for the

global citizen.

The cage in which Kenneth Bigley was displayed was central to his visual

objectification and to the emotional resonance of the images as they were

reproduced in newspaper and TV stills. Television screen clips showing a close-

up of Bigley crouching in the wire box set up against a brick wall appeared online

and in the press: it was this scene in particular that Tony Blair declared to be

sickening. Elaine Scarry (1985) observes that the room or cage in which the

prisoner is held is loaded with meaning. The cage is a symbolic as well as literal

contraction of the prisoners world and a graphic expression of ones situation,

as Scarry states:

In normal contexts, the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses

the most benign potential of human life. It is . . . an enlargement of

the body. . . . It keeps warm and safe the individual it houses. . . . But while

the room is a magnification of the body, it is simultaneously a

miniaturization of the world, of civilisation. (3940)

This is because it is only when the body is comfortable that the individual can

engage with the external world. The cage then exemplified the decline into

barbarism of those who opposed the Iraqi regime change, a word deployed by

Western journalists and politicians alike. But the dreadful staging of Kenneth

Bigley in his jumpsuit was also purposeful in its evocation of those Afghan pris-

oners of uncertain status held in serried cages at Guantanamo Bay. And the

cage with its confining chicken-wire walls came to symbolize and condense in

one image the whole sorry saga from 9/11 (2001) to that momentacting as a

visual rejoinder to the endless officially sanctioned images of containment at the

Guantanamo camp already in circulation.


In their different ways all of the videos carried a visual and emotionally

visceral impact, but it certainly was the final one that will be remembered most

by those who saw it. The final film was reminiscent of early cinemas spectacle

film, a shocking scene of execution that does not require narrativization to make

it comprehensible or to give it impact (Black 2002, 131). At the same time it was

typical of what Joel Black calls the graphic imperative of the information age.

As Black says, Now that cameras have been banned from execution chambers

and many courtrooms, the broadcast media . . . have become the lastalso the

most graphicdomain in which both fictional and actual violence can be dis-

played as public spectacle (30). In the first instance, the fact that these films

were unedited underscored their immediacy and lent them a news media real-

time look in keeping with the new aesthetics of rolling news, grainy, authentic,

poor production values married to high news values. The videos codes and

conventions signified breaking news. And yet, the inerrability of the footage

(subsequently edited or taken for stills, inserted into broadcast or Internet news

reports) arguably transformed actuality into commodified news, whose affective

status is difficult to assess.5 Sara Knox comments on the filming of U.S. state-sanctioned executions and the problematic of rendering the real-time event:

It is hard to imagine a television network broadcasting an uneditedversion of the execution. Quickly the real time that marks the

documentary integrity of the piece fragments and decays into the episodic

highlights so dear to tabloid television. Only a live broadcast might retainthe dread of real time. . . . But it might also, simultaneously, change the

nature of the document from news into rank media spectacle. . . . The

uncertain affective power of any documentary medium stands as atestament not to the complete relativity of meaning, but [also] to its

vicissitudes in culture. (1998, 194)

The affective status of this final film is, like any film footage, ultimately

uncertain, but it would be safe to say that it is, as indeed it must be, rooted in

its taboo-breaking properties and in its confirmation of the precariousness ofmodern life. In her book Pictures at an Execution, Wendy Lesser (1993) recalls

the mixed emotional reactions generated in the wake of the filmed state execution

of murderer Robert Alton Harris, who was killed in 1992, becoming the firstperson to be put to death in California for twenty-five years. Newspapers

reported widespread emotional distress among the states citizens. Lesser adds:

The terrible irony of the death penalty [is], we take personally something

that is not actually happening to us, so that even the sufferingthe one

thing left to the condemned man, the one thing we have not deprived himofbecomes our own rather than, or a much as, his. (249)


Lesser also makes a larger point, and this certainly pertains to the Bigley case,

that the affective impact of filmed executions must be understood in the broader

context of media coverage. The war body on screen frequently reaches us and

touches our imagination via its secondary circulation, not only through pho-

tographs but also via written descriptions of the filmed event. She recalls of the

Harris execution:

These images of the execution afflicted us even though we didnt

actually see ita problem the newspapers self-righteously blamed on

television. . . . [But] even TV could only give us in abbreviated form what

the newspapers gave us at length. . . . The images that plagued and

frightened us were made entirely of words. (24950)

It thus is difficult to assess the emotional impact of these images and their cir-

culation, which appeared in so many variants across the lifetime of the story. On

a commonsense level, newsmakers were certain that these images were emo-

tionally powerful, and this can be supported by academic research undertaken

soon after the event. For example, Aarti Iyer and Julian Oldmeadows (2006)

case-study evaluation of emotional responses of fear, sympathy, and anger when

viewing photographs of the Bigley kidnapping demonstrated how pictures of

Kenneth Bigley in a state of physical and emotional distress increased feelings of

fearfulness, but not anger (or indeed sympathy, which was present in both the

group who viewed the photographs and the control group). The researchers

began their case study by observing that the British press focused heavily on

Bigley as victim, with little graphic emphasis given to the kidnappers. After certain

participants in the study saw five photographs of Bigley in captivity as reproduced

in the Daily Mail of September 30, 2004, they reported reliably stronger feelings

of fear . . . compared to those who did not see them (642). Fearfulness coalesced

around Bigleys status as a victim, with little control over his situation. This

increased fearfulness arguably had political implications since it could indirectly

increase support for negotiating and/or submitting to the captors demands. The

researchers concluded, One reading of this research, then, is that those who

asked the media not to publish the photographs of Mr. Bigley may have been

correct in their misgivings. On a larger scale, the effects of the images that we

have identified may be in the interests of the kidnappers by promoting support

for negotiations (645).6

Many newsmakers conceded that the Bigley case became a news event chiefly

because of its emotional punch was enhanced by its conveyance through visualmedia. It could be argued that the Independent, the Guardian, the Mirror, and

the Liverpool Echo were especially emotionally charged: other newspapers leveled

accusations that this was due to a partisan attitude to Britains part in the war inIraq (Vass 2004). Papers were confident enough to make political points via the

emotionally loaded contrast of two images of people involved in the news. For

example, the Independents piece called Parallel Worlds (Cornwell 2004)


juxtaposed pictures of the interim prime minister Iyad Allawi and Mrs. Bigley

(Kenneths mother) in order to highlight the differences between the official line

on the governance of Iraq and the human cost of the situation on the ground.

The articles subheading ran: In Washington, the Iraqi PM is applauded by

Congress and feted by George Bush. In Liverpool, Kenneth Bigleys mother is

rushed to hospital after pleading for sons life. Becks description (discussed

above) of the impact of risk on ordinary people dovetails nicely with the Inde-

pendents article, which suggests that side by side with official knowledge and

political rhetoric sits certain laypeople damaged by policy. The executive editor

of the Independent John Mullin stated, Our tack has been to make it very per-

sonal and very much about Bigley (via Vass 2004). The deputy editor of the

Press and Journal cited the reasons for the storys prominence as sympathy for

Bigley and also the visual images of him with his captors and the frank appeals

he made to Tony Blair (Vass 2004). Hence, overall the story gained momentum

as an extraordinary emotional tale that was also politically important (ac-

cording to the Guardians home editor) and that seemed to justify intense

coverage despite a backdrop in which people were dying in Iraq daily.

The representation of Bigley in this way raises powerful political-ethical issues

about the geopolitical status of the body, its role as possessed or dispossessed by

a culture, and the public recognition and validation of its corporeal vulnerability.

Regular media coverage of military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and the suspension

of the rights of democratic citizenship for those interned in Guantanamo Bay

has revealed that numerous subjects have been reduced to an inhuman status,

to what theorist Giorgio Agamben has astutely named bare life (Agamben

1998; Butler 2004a, 67). This is the life of those deprived of their ontological

status as a subject awarded the rights of modern democratic citizenship. The state

of emergency invoked by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, for example,

during the post-9/11 conflict in Iraq provided the biopolitical condition for

reducing those accused of terrorism to a liminal human status. Examples of this

status were uncovered in the newspaper coverage of torture and abuse in Abu

Ghraib prison and extended with Web coverage of military trials of U.S. and

British troops who stood accused of perpetrating abuse. The public debate over

the human rights scandal was initiated on January 13, 2004, when Joseph Darby

handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the U.S. Armys Criminal

Investigation Command (CID). The following day the army commenced a

criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New

Yorker published photos and stories of horrific scenes of torture and dehuman-

ization inside the prison. These images of naked, hooded, and cowering prisoners

in scenes, often staged for the camera, of physical and sexual humiliation and

abuse are now familiar to news consumers. The Web site Salon.com controver-

sially published an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first

gathered by the CID and obtained from a leaked U.S.-army investigation report

into the abuse.7


Mourning Kenneth Bigley

As recounted above, the Bigley story unfolded in an arena where news consumers

were increasingly faced with graphic, highly unpalatable images and written

accounts of abuse administered by all participants in the conflict. It was not only

the kidnap video images of Kenneth Bigley that raised the emotional ante, but

also the broader accounts of what he was like as a person. In describing the public

expression of emotion on October 9 in Liverpool following the announcement

of his death, the journalist Colin Wills observed:

There was something about Kenneth Bigley that Liverpool warmed to.

The pictures of him that filled the newspapers and beamed out from every

TV set was of a chirpy man in an open-necked shirt with an obvious

appetite for the fun in life, always smiling, always looking for the next

joke. (2004)

These pictures supported the familys promotion of Kenneth as an ordinary

family man, whose lifestyle and values would be accessible to the majority of

those hearing his story.

The degree to which certain constituencies seemed to identify with the Bigley

familys situation became starkly apparent in the wake of his death. On Saturday,

October 11, at Liverpool town hall, the Union Flag hung at half-mast, and queues

formed to sign books of condolences. The city held a two-minute silence from

noon as a mark of respect, with many gathering in the town-hall square, which

featured a sculpture of a despairing figure in chainsa figure that news pictures

reproduced and many commentators linked to the now iconic image of Kenneth

Bigley. At midday the citys bells tolled sixty-two times, once to mark each year

of his life. More than one Liverpudlian linked their sadness at his demise to other

collective traumas experienced by the citys people, such as the Hillsborough

football stadium disaster and the murder of James Bulger. News reports situated

this local mourning within the broader context of a national event and reprinted

dozens of statements of condolence from royalty, politicians, and religious lead-

ers. The Liverpool Echos leader of October 9 declared: The murder of Ken Bigley

by unprincipled men of violence has sickened not just this city but [also] the

world. . . . No-one will ever forget the heart-rending images of Mr. Bigley, his

family and, particularly, his 86-year-old mother, as they pleaded for mercy. On

October 10 the Sunday Mirror declared a nation in mourning.

These expressions of collective emotion are not unprecedented, and subse-

quent criticisms aimed at Liverpudlians disproportionate wallowing in emo-

tions and being hooked on grief explicitly looked back to not only disasters

such as Hillsborough but also to the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana in

1997an event that seemed to mark a sea change in not only the conventions

of the public exhibition of emotion in Britain, but also in the political mood of

the nation (Nunn 1999).8 These criticisms, voiced by Conservative politician and


Spectator news magazine editor Boris Jonson (2004), triggered a lively public

debate about whether modern citizens were slipping into inappropriate senti-

mentalism and emotional incontinence. Ultimately Jonson was forced to back

down and apologize, even undertaking a penitential tour of Liverpool on October

20, with a huge media entourage in tow.

Jonsons criticisms may have been valid or not, but what they failed to engage

with was the mechanics of what Nick Couldry (1999, 77, 83) refers to, in the case

of Diana, as a collective confrontation with death, and the way in which such

events can open up spaces where stories of death can be shared and where new,

if temporary, locations for experiencing the social can be established. The im-

plication of Jonsons critique was that the behavior of the Liverpudlian mourners

was somewhat embarrassing and self-indulgent, generated by a sense of affilia-

tion with someone they only knew through the media. In this sense observers

had raised the question of whether citizens had gone beyond the culturally per-

missible in their expression of emotion (Harding and Pribram 2002).

Contrary to Jonson, we can say that it was the very fact of the representation

of Kenneth Bigleys death in the media and on screen in particular, its circulation

and repetition, that required a collective response even from those who did not

know the man. In her discussion of the public display of death in contemporary

culture, as played out in psychoanalysis, in modern museums, and on television,

Ariella Azoulay suggests that the displayed images of death

constantly refer to a lost or an absent image. . . . Within the television set,

the missing image is the image of death itself, of the very presence of death,

which would somehow transcend the flux of its representations

constantly projected on the screen. No matter how differently these three

sites are organized, they share a similar motivation, to help the apparition

of the lost image. But in fact they all produce the conditions for an

unfinished work of mourning. (2001, 4)

Cultural respondents to the affective space of public politics in Britain and the

U.S. post 9/11 point to the experience of dispossession wrought for many citizens

for whom a prior sense of privilege and security had been part of their existence

as late-modern national citizens of Western democracy. In contrast to adversarial

and militaristic state responses to the vulnerability wrought in that moment,

other responses include a forging of political community brought to the fore by

identifying with others through a sense of loss, grief, and rage (Butler 2004c,

2122, 2829). Although such emotions can be used to reassert a military agenda

and/or to reassert reinforced national boundaries, they can also be appropriated

for other forms of protest. As Andrea Brady argues in her analysis of grief work

in a war economy,

Grief is never an unmediated feeling. But neither is it just a plodding

through conventions, a rhetorical performance.Grief can be


subversive. Ritual mourning confirms the bonds within a community; it

can also vent dissent and fears of exclusion or change. (2002, 11)

The rituals of mourning anticipated by the media coverage of Kenneth Bigley

while he was still alive in captivity, and underscored after his death, were arguably

taken up by the Liverpudlian community and made their own.9 Bigley was denied

dignity and ultimately his life by his kidnappers in what could be construed as a

knowing violent media spectacle; yet one of the unforeseen results was a proteston the part of the Bigley family, the broader Liverpudlian community, and indeed

large sections of the national media against both the kidnappers and the states

potential appropriation of Bigleys plight in the name of the supposedly collectiveWar against Terror. In the information age, the mediation of Kenneth Bigleys

incarceration and death reveals the difficulty of separating the power of the media

image from the ways in which it can potentially accrue collective meaning andemotional investment. If, as Boris Jonson argues, albeit rather crudely, grief

and other emotions are overarticulated in the media and the current therapy

culture, then perhaps, viewed positively, this enables readers and viewers todraw upon the discourse of emotion as a symbolic vehicle to express, albeit

fleetingly, their collective ties and to voice their criticism of those in power

(Brady 2002, 10).Media coverage of the kidnapping suggests that these events bound citizens

together in sympathy and ultimately in grief. As reviewed, academic research has

suggested that fearfulness may also have played a part in the publics fascinationwith the case. Mr. Bigleys demise certainly led to a great expression of public

mourning, and this emotional investment must have been predicated in part on

the extensive and hugely sympathetic media coverage. In discussing the con-temporary post-9/11 spectrum of precarious lives, philosopher Judith Butler

observes: The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence

is, Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makesfor a grievable life? (2004c, 20) We can argue that in the mass media and in the

context of the ongoing War against Terror, some bodies and some subjects count

as more grievable than others, and that this calibration of value is partly rootedin the ways in which images of war bodies are depicted, circulated, and con-

sumed. It therefore seems that in the final analysis the mass media reiteration of

images of the kidnapped (Western) body opens up the question of what consti-tutes the publicly endorsed grievable life.

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Notes

1. For this work we surveyed 502 English language news items available in the UK dating from

the kidnapping until May 2006. This included 381 newspaper reports, 55 press releases, 26 news

transcripts, five magazines/journals, two Web-based publications, and 44 aggregate news sources.

2. In a small but resonant way, it also highlighted how, in Darren OByrnes (2003, 21) words,

global uncertainty has also breathed new life into what we might call the global lifeworld, the

antithesis of the global system, which is articulated through the activities of campaigning organisa-

tions and global citizens.

3. Although we do not have the space to consider it here, the films made of Bigley by the Iraq

militia were also read as emblematic of the failure of British and American foreign policy failure in

quite different quarters and in quite different ways. A Guardian journalist interviewing people in a

Baghdad caf during the Bigley events gives this account of a young man who pulled out a Nokia

mobile phone from his pocket: He switched on the screen-saver clip, and a grainy scene appeared

of men wearing black standing around a man in an orange jumpsuit. One of the men lifts a big sword,

and the scene cuts to the man in the jumpsuit lying dead in a pool of blood. The men around him

are screaming, Allahu Akbar [God is great]. Every time I watch this, I feel sick, said the man. But

this is the only way to liberate my country (Abdul-Ahad 2004).

4. Its screening attracted few formal complaints from the viewing public. A complaint lodged

against TV New Zealand by a viewer who regarded this footage (alongside the other videos) as an

invasion of Bigleys privacy and a pandering to the criminal intents of the kidnappers seems to be

exceptional. See http://www.bsa.govt.nz/decisions/2004/2004-179.htm (accessed July 31, 2007). On

the other hand, media professionals actively debated these issues (Sambrook 2006). The era of digital

imaging thus ushers in new questions about the rights of the imprisoned, tortured, and/or slaugh-

tered body as it is represented in the media and as cultural artifact (Boltanski 1999, xv).

5. The property of reiterating shocking images in news media is arguably central to how trauma

is mediated and therefore experienced at a collective level. James Der Derians (2005, 325) reflection

on the coverage of 9/11 (2001), for example, argues that it was the networking of images whether


through terrorist, Internet, or prime-time media and their continuous reenactment that came to

exemplify and indeed crystallize a national trauma.

6. More than one media commentator argued that Bigleys exploitation as a hostage was pro-

longed because of the British medias somewhat nave in-depth coverage. Writing in the Independent

on Sunday, Joan Smith (2004) suggested, for example, that Bigleys American companions died more

quickly because the U.S. media no longer afford kidnappings a high degree of publicity.

7. See the archives at http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/ (ac-

cessed July 31, 2007). Public debate also continued about the status of the image as accurate reference

following one infamous example when the British tabloid Daily Mirror published photos on May 1,

2004, that appeared to show British troops from the Queens Lancashire Regiment torturing an Iraqi

detainee. In one picture a soldier was depicted urinating on a hooded man; in another a hooded man

was being hit with a rifle in the groin. The pictures were subsequently revealed to be fakes, and the

Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan was subsequently fired.

8. For a contemporary analysis of the mediated articulation of grief and the centrality of ordinary

people in the media coverage of disasters, see Pantti and Wahl-Jorgensen (2006).

9. These significantly were mediated rituals of mourning (see Couldry 2003).


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