Neuroskepticism - Neurotechnology in National Security and Defense - page 188

context, the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I have chosen this example not
simply to illustrate how images and narratives work together, but also to demonstrate
the potential hazards when science is purportedly deployed in a national security
context.
In February 2003, the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made a presentation
to the United Nations Security Council that was intended to substantiate the U.S.
argument that Iraq presented an imminent threat to regional and global security. Most
people recall Powell's presentation—which he subsequently described as a perma-
nent “blot” on his record (Weisman 2005)—because of a theatrical flourish. He held
up a small vial of white powder while describing the threat that a similar quantity of
weaponized anthrax might present. Fewer may now recall some of the other visual
elements of his presentation—in particular, his reliance on image intelligence (or
IMINT—the term used in “national securitese ” to denote aerial and satellite photog-
raphy). Powell showed time-sequenced satellite images of buildings whose functions
were described in yellow text boxes—among them a chemical munitions bunker. He
also showed computer-generated images of trucks and railway carriages that were
described as “mobile production facilities for biological agents.” Before displaying
the images, Powell warned that we could not understand them, but that imaging
experts had shed light where, otherwise, there would only be darkness:
The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to
interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years
and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you
these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate, to
our imagery specialists.
As the filmmaker Errol Morris subsequently noted in a New York Times blog:
I don't know what these buildings were really used for. I don't know whether they
were used for chemical weapons at one time, and then transformed into something
relatively innocuous, in order to hide the reality of what was going on from weapons
inspectors. But I do know that the yellow captions influence how we see the pictures.
'Chemical Munitions Bunker' is different from 'Empty Warehouse' which is different
from 'International House of Pancakes.' The image remains the same but we see it dif-
ferently. . . . (Morris 2008)
The interpretations of these photographs offered so convincingly by Powell have, of
course, failed to stand up to scrutiny. Embarrassingly for the Bush administration,
the Iraq Survey Group failed to find any evidence of an active program for the devel-
opment of weapons of mass destruction. But, by that time, the images had done their
work. According to Morris, the captions did the “heavy lifting,” while the “pictures
merely provide[d] the window dressing.” But this account does not give full credit
to the powerful way in which the images and the narrative work together, each rein-
forcing the other. The image, requiring interpretive expertise, validates the expert
interpreter. And the act of interpretation gives meaning to the image that is otherwise
incomprehensible to the lay viewer. In this deceptively attractive circularity (that I
call the “image-expert bootstrap”), the image tells us how important the expert is,