for the ghostly bodies showing through the plastic wrap.footnote^＊ No words for the faces of despair and elation bubbling from the TV screen, faces of hatred and madness and dedication to death, faces that have had the truth of ‘collateral damage’ played out to them over the cell-phone videos even before the sound of the drone has faded.

No one who witnessed the moral bankruptcy of the media during the Iraq campaign can be left with the least illusion about the world the networks show us. But something is shifting in the pattern of image dissemination. The reality of ‘statecraft’ and ‘deterrence’ is more and more on view. And it is a reality that lies at the heart of modernity. For more than a century, modernity and state terror from the air—modernity and mass civilian death—have been mutually constitutive terms. But never before so instantly, so vividly, so ubiquitously.

‘Our federal government,’ says Donald Rumsfeld, ‘is really only beginning to adapt its operations to the 21st century. Today we’re engaged in the first war in history—unconventional and irregular as it may be—in an era of e-mails, blogs, cell phones, BlackBerrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global Internet with no inhibitions, hand-held videocameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There’s never been a war fought in this environment before.’ (Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, 17 February 2006). It is all so unfair, sighs the Torturer-in-Chief. It makes our Terror indistinguishable from theirs.