Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
These are two scenes from the vast quantity of images which SPOT, Landsat,
Sovinformsputnik, and other satellites record daily and store in databases: ready
to be browsed and bought. They are collections of data—although they are pre -
sented as pixels that resemble an image—information waiting to be examined and
interpreted, snapshots in time and space, this time of a war.
Other data were being collected at the time, as well, but we did not have
quite the same access to it. “The former Yugoslavia is the most listened to, photo -
graphed, monitored, overheard and intercepted entity in the history of mankind,”
a U.S. State Department official had told the
New York Review of Books
a few years
earlier in a story on the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to make public the
evidence of war crimes that it had collected through “what are officially called
'national technical means,'” and then what happened when they did. “A pair of
photographs changed the course of the war in Bosnia,” wrote Charles Lane and
Thom Shanker about U-2 and satellite imagery from Srebrenica in 1995.
35
By 1999, some products of that information-gathering enterprise did make their
way into the public domain. This time, the U.S. and its NATO allies were in the fight,
not trying to stay out of it. So Kosovo names, among other things, the conflict in
which classified NATO images were finally released systematically to the public.
And they were not simply pictures of the conduct of the war, but of its ostensible
reasons. This time, in addition to footage of bombs and missiles, the public could
see ethnic cleansing in progress: high-resolution imagery of mass graves, refugees
in the mountains, burning villages, and organized deportations. It was the war in
which satellite images were used as a way of forming public opinion. The manner
in which they were released, however—as pictures, rather than as data—shows
less the facts on the ground than the ability of the technology to record, in minute
detail, these facts. No data, strictly speaking, were forthcoming at press briefings,
and certainly not the data embedded in the pixels they had interpreted, and no
information was available about the technology that had produced them. But there
were lots of images. The Pentagon's military briefer, Major General Charles Wald,
said one afternoon while answering a question about displaced people (“Do you
have some recon on that?”): “So to answer your question, are we imaging them?
Yes, we are.” Then he added: “I won't talk about what kind of imagery that is.”
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Stretched out horizontally across sixty kilometers, the Drenica Valley of Kosovo
in early June is displayed in what the analysts of overhead imagery call “stan -
dard false color.” We know how to read this image, more or less, because we know
what the colors of the pixels conventionally represent: red is vegetation, purple
is marshland or farmland, blue is roads, buildings, and bare soil, dark blue is clear
water, white is clouds or smoke, and black is something burned. But add to this
what else we know about these picture elements: that they present data. Each
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