To Stare Into The Face Of War

Mar302003

One of the best journalists with the photographic lense is photographer Peter Turnley

The multiple award-winning photographer (also recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize) has impressively documented the first Gulf War.

In 2003, Peter was kind enough to grant me the publishing of some of his exceptional photographs he took during Gulf War I. They were featured in an editorial of mine on the website "ONLINE WRITERS AGAINST WAR", an organisation I had founded with like-minded writers and journalists from all over the globe to raise our voices and warn against G.W.Bush's impending "Shock and Awe" invasion of Iraq.

We all feared that this pre-emptive and illegal attack on a sovereign nation, albeit run by a dictator, would open the Box of Pandora and would unleash chaos to the entire region. History has meanwhile proven us dreadfully right, with the world a far less safer place, the Near and Middle East - again - a powder cake ready to explode.

In 2005, our organisation decided to disband and to cease operating the website (its domain was deleted later in 2006). The reason for this decision was the sophisticated and devastating hacker attack we had experienced only a few months before, in which our server was destroyed and all our work computers had been rendered practically useless.

An extensive investigation performed by renowned computer forensics strongly suggested that ONLINE WRITERS AGAINST WAR had long been on the radar of several government agencies during the ongoing Iraq war, and that this attack looked very much like it could be attributed to the, at the time, publically little known cyber warfare unit of the pentagon.

We didn't want to run the risk of being 'plucked off' the street (as it actually happened to an Italian colleague) and be shipped to one of the CIA's black sites, of which several were run by them during this period in some Eastern European countries.

The Unseen Guld War - Photo Documentary by Peter Turnley During the first Gulf War, Peter's exceptional and deeply impacting photographs didn't make the front page or were run by major TV channels. The then created military pool system was meant to be (and it was!) a major impediment for "photojournalists in their quest to communicate the realities of war". [i]

But, apart from that, most publications and television entities had already bought their media program before Gulf War I. began. What shameful truth this conduct by the media proved and is as true today as it was then:

In his photo documentary "The Unseen Gulf War", Peter Turnley's lense had caught a truth the US government did not want to be revealed, as it was a truth filled with war's most ugly face!

Today, we find ourselves, yet again, confronted with the real possibility of war being waged by another US president - however, one far more dangerous in his intentions and mental judgement.

All of us need to look into the ugly face of war! We must make sure it will never appear in front of us again. Because if it does, this time, we will stare into an abyss filled with a horror never ending; one that world leaders sadly seem to remember merely by the names of "Hiroshima" and "Nagasaki", and not by the the abomination of nuclear war unleashed upon millions of civilians suffering its consequences to this day.

Peter Turnley's photographs from war-torn countries and regions of conflict, but especially the ones he took during the first Gulf War, are not only a valuable, but in my eyes crucial education for all those who never before experienced such horrors. They hopefully will be shocking enough to those who seem to think war were merely a computer game.

Turnley in his letter to the editor of the Digital Journalist in his essay from the year 2002

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