"I put my camera up to my eye, I was going to take a photograph. I didn't notice a GI kneeling down beside me with his M-16 rifle pointed at the child. Then I suddenly heard the crack and through the viewfinder I saw this child flip over on top of the pile of bodies. The GI stood up and just walked away. No remorse. Nothing."
The words were those of Ronald Haeberle, the US army photographer who took what have been, until now, the most infamous photographs of American atrocities. Haeberle was with Charlie Company when it murdered, raped, tortured and mutilated hundreds of civilians in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in March 1968. He created the images that made My Lai, unlike dozens of similar massacres by the US in Vietnam, a fact.
The woman dressed in black trousers and dark blue shirt lying on the ground as if asleep, her brains oozing gently beside her head. The ragged pile of dead women and tiny babies strewn like rubbish on the little path between the paddy fields. The lads enjoying their lunch break, stretched in the sunshine, a few yards from a pile of corpses. Without these pictures, My Lai never happened. Even as it was, the photographs sanitised the event, leaving out the extreme sexual violence that was at its heart.
If we move forward 25 years to when the photographs were taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, there are superficial similarities. Just as anyone who cared to look knew damn well that the Americans were committing atrocities in Vietnam, so torture and murder in Iraq were understood by anyone who cared to know. Yet just as Haeberle's pictures were required to make the atrocities in Vietnam real, so all the warnings from the Red Cross and Amnesty meant nothing until we saw those images on our screens and in our newspapers.
Beneath these similarities, however, there is a shocking difference. It has to do with the attitude of the perpetrators to the camera. At My Lai, the camera was a dangerous intruder. Some of the soldiers who were carrying out the atrocities were so frenzied that they simply didn't notice the photographer.
When some soldiers who were sexually abusing children did become aware of Haeberle's presence, one of them called out "Hey look, he's got a camera" and the abuse stopped until he had passed. Haeberle himself was uneasy about photographing what was going on: he didn't take pictures of torture and rape, and he hid his photographs for a long time, knowing how shameful and awful they were.
It was precisely the sense that such pictures were appalling and dangerous that led to the kind of skilful news management that has characterised the Iraq war. Sophisticated control of imagery has ensured that we haven't seen many pictures of the regular massacres of civilians unfortunate enough to turn up at the wrong checkpoint at the wrong time. The war has been sanitised to a degree that those in charge of propaganda in Vietnam could not have dreamed possible.
Yet, in a grotesque irony, this brilliant operation has been undone by something else they would not have thought possible: the brazen desire of the perpetrators to photograph their own atrocities. In 1968 "Hey look, he's got a camera" was a signal to stop. Now, it's a signal to pose.
The true perversity of what has been going on lies in the absence of any sense that sadism is even a guilty pleasure. A year ago, for example, a young member of the Royal Fusiliers came home to Staffordshire with his collection of snaps from his Iraqi tour of duty. He left them into a photo shop to be developed. Among them were pictures of Iraqi men being forced to perform acts of oral and anal sex.
The utterly unselfconscious way in which these pictures were treated like holiday snaps from Ibiza points to a belief that what they showed was perfectly normal. There was nothing to be ashamed of.
This, I think, is new. There is nothing surprising or unpredictable about people inflicting pain and humiliation on those in their power. This desire is neither confined to Americans (read the Amnesty International report published last week on the participation of international peacekeepers in sexual slavery in Kosovo) or to armies (think of the abuse of children in industrial schools here).
But the complete absence of shame manifested in the desire to make images of the abuse and share them does seem specific to our desensitised, media-saturated age.
It arises, perhaps, from the mainstreaming of pornography and, in particular, of sado-eroticism. There's always been an argument about whether repeated exposure to sadistic images really affects human behaviour. The evidence from Iraq suggests that in some situations it does. It is hardly irrelevant, for example, that faked images of Iraqi women being raped by Americans passed around by the Islamic resistance were not created by them but downloaded from American porn sites.
Or that many apparently normal people have downloaded for pleasure images of child abuse. Where once sadistic acts were performed for their own sake away from the camera, it is somehow characteristic of our times that they are now enacted in order to be photographed.