On Seeing the Photo of Nicolás Maduro Aboard the U.S.S. Iwo Jima

Authenticating a photograph

On Sunday, May 4, a day after the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from his compound in Caracas, The New York Times published a short piece about their decision to publish, the day before, a photograph of the prisoner on board the U.S.S. Iwo Jima. The column was written by Meaghan Looram, director of photography at the Times, beneath the headline: “How The Times Assessed That Photo From Trump of Maduro in Handcuffs.” The subhead read: “Hours after President Trump announced that the United States had seized Nicolás Maduro, various photos that appeared to show the captured Venezuelan leader hit the internet.”  The column is part of an occasional series, rubricked above the headline, “Times Insider.” (Another in the series appeared on Jan. 5, headlined: “Behind the Scenes of Our Nicolás Maduro Front Page.”)

Looram explained that in the hours after Maduro’s snatching, two photos appeared on multiple websites purporting to show the Venezuelan president in custody. The veracity of neither was certain, she wrote, and the Times has no foolproof way of determining if a photo is taken from life or is AI generated. Editors chose not to publish either, for reasons briefly outlined by Looram.

 The first photograph shows Maduro seated and handcuffed in front.  He’s surround by three, U.S. servicemen (two seated, one standing) wearing jungle camouflage, in what appears to be an aircraft. Timesanalysts, according to Looram, were suspicious of the two rows of windows, unknown in any aircraft they could identify. They might also have been put off by Maduro’s white suit. It’s a liqui liqui, considered the national, formal menswear in Venezuela and Colombia, consisting of a white, shirt-like jacket with Nehru-style rounded collar and matching trousers.  Judging from published photographs, Maduro wears them sometimes but prefers an all-black version – he may feel it projects a tougher, more anti-imperialist look. I’d be surprised if the first thing he did when he when he heard U.S. troops blasting into his compound at 2:30 a.m. was change into a liqui liqui.

The second photo shows the Venezuelan president being escorted away from an airplane by two, DEA agents in desert camouflage. His hands this time are behind his back, presumably handcuffed, and he’s wearing a blue, probably denim jacket over an open necked white shirt. The Times said little about the photo except to note that Maduro’s outfit is different from the previous photograph. It’s possible he was given the blue jacket for warmth prior to deplaning, but there are other anomalies. His white shirt appears to have no buttons—he’d never be able to pull it over his head. Thus, there’s good reason to believe one, if not both photos are bogus; the Times was correct to be suspicious.

The newspaper’s decision to to publish the third photo – the one supplied by Trump himself from his Truth Social account was the correct one, though Looram’s discussion of it was inadequate to say the least.  She started off well, noting the strangeness of the photo: It’s of poor quality, possibly taken from a printout or screen. Second, it was obviously cropped, probably all around.  That suggests it could have been taken long before the events, with dispositive evidence of its inauthenticity removed. But Times editors reasoned that even if it was fake, Trump’s endorsement of it was newsworthy. If it turned out to be bogus, in other words, the U.S. president would be the fool, not the Times.  It could be argued, against this, that complicity with a liar can’t be counted as journalistic virtue, but given worldwide interest in the subject, the decision to publish was reasonable. By all accounts, the photograph is indeed authentic, and a slightly bigger one has been published elsewhere, including in Counterpunch.

But how do we explain the U.S. paper of record’s failure to discuss the content of the photograph? Surely a photograph of a foreign president, handcuffed, blindfolded, wearing earmuffs to block sound and holding a water bottle, is unusual and worthy of commentary. The only explanation for silence is that editors or staff at The New York Times are still wedded to the quaint notion that the U.S. does not routinely torture, abuse, humiliate or intimidate prisoners in its charge.

Blindfolds, intimidation, sensory deprivation and other abuse

The use of blindfolds and earmuffs to transport Maduro can’t be justified on national security grounds. Did they fear Maduro calling his generals on a cellphone to report his latitude and longitude so they could attempt an ocean rescue? Did they think he’d ever be in a position to reveal the secret assets and vulnerabilities of the battle-tested Wasp Class, Iwo Jima amphibious assault ship?  The reason sensory deprivation devices were used was to intimidate, disorient, and otherwise induce in Maduro a sense of helplessness and distress. This is a form of “touchless torture” proscribed by the U.N. Convention Against Torture (Articles 1 and 16) as interpreted by the U.N. Committee Against Torture through its Istanbul Protocol:

Deprivation of normal sensory stimulation, such as sound, light, sense of time, isolation, manipulation of brightness of the cell, abuse of physiological needs, restriction of sleep, food, water, toilet facilities, bathing, motor activities, medical care, social contacts, isolation within prison, loss of contact with the outside world (victims are often kept in isolation in order to prevent bonding and mutual identification and to encourage traumatic bonding with the torturer.)

Spranager, Wisdom Conquering Ignorance, c. 1600. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Artist unknown, Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, of uytbeeldingen des verstands, Amsterdam, 1644.

The iconography of sensory deprivation – especially blindness, deafness and bound hands – has a long history. They are associated with ignorance and moral failure. In about 1600, the Netherlandish artist, Bartholomeus Spranger engraved Wisdom Conquers Ignorance. It shows a helmeted goddess, Minerva crushing Ignorance beneath her feet. The benighted figure has closed eyes, bound hands and donkey’s ears. In Cesare Ripa’s popular emblem book, Iconologia (1593) “Ignorance” or “Error” is shown as a blindfolded man, feeling his way through a landscape with a long staff.

In an etching from 1799, the Spanish artist, Francisco Goya pilloried the blindness, ignorance, greed and uselessness of the Spanish nobility by showing two men with eyes shut, ears closed (with locks), arms restricted by coats of arms, and hands encumbered by useless tools, in one case a rosary and in the other a ceremonial sword. A personied figure of Ignorance, blindfolded and with donkey’s ears, feeds the two men gruel, as if they were children in a highchair.

Blindfolds for Goya are also associated with executions. In his series Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), he illustrated atrocities committed by the invading French during the Peninsular War (1808-14). In an etching titled “Y no hai remedio” (“There is no help”), he shows executed, or soon-to-be-executed Spanish men in blindfolds. The political vacuum in Latin America caused by the Peninsular War in Spain, directly led to a declaration of Venezuelan independence in 1811 (the first Spanish colony to do so) and a series of subsequent pitched battles and guerrilla wars. If you are a Latin American patriot like Maduro, schooled in what former socialist president Hugo Chavez called the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a blindfold signals the likelihood you will be executed.

The U.S. has long used hooding, blindfolds, earmuffs and other forms of sensory deprivation as a means of torture and intimidation. Hooding was used on prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and hoods, blindfolds, and earmuffs on prisoners sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The treatment is considered by interrogators to be a way of inducing learned helplessness and making prisoners more compliant during interrogation. Even the water bottle that Maduro holds in his hands in the photograph serves a U.S. purpose – it’s intended simultaneously to persuade the prisoner of his own dependence on the Americans, and to tell a global audience he’s being treated humanely.

Maduro’s fate and ours

The conditions in which Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores are being held, and the nature of their interrogation at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn are unknown. Though the jail, according to the  Legal Aid Society has a “documented history of violence, medical neglect, and human and civil rights violations,” it may be difficult for officers and officials to abuse their prisoners without information getting out. What we can be certain of – based upon the photographs above, and subsequent images of Maduro being escorted off his plane and doing a “perp walk” – is that his public appearances will be choreographed to diminish his stature and weaken his resistance. At stake is the freedom of Maduro and Flores, the integrity of the U.S. criminal justice system, the independence of other Latin American states, the international rule of law (what’s left of it), the success or failure of American neo-imperialism, and the fate of U.S. capitalist democracy.

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