NYTimes: Out From Behind a Camera at a Khmer Torture House

Interesting. Thanks for the link.

Thanks for posting, JB.

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<hr> “I’m just a photographer; I don’t know anything,” he said he told the newly arrived prisoners as he removed their blindfolds and adjusted the angles of their heads. But he knew, as they did not, that every one of them would be killed.<hr></blockquote>
I think it was funnier when Sgt Schultz said it.

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<hr>“I had my job, and I had to take care of my job,” he said in a recent interview. “Each of us had our own responsibilities. I wasn’t allowed to speak with prisoners.”<hr></blockquote>
So he was just following orders. What a reprehensible individual. And he will never be tried. This whole process is seriously flawed.

The pictures were very huanting for me to see, the expressions on their faces....

Foolsprogress, curious why you think he is reprehensible? Take photographs or be shot, that's an easy choice to make.

#5 - If that justifies his actions then pretty much every KR short of Pol Pot is innocent. They can all make that excuse. And in so far as a drafted line soldier might be able to make some version of that excuse, we're not talking about some grunt cadre here. He was a photographer at S-21 which makes him more comparable to a guard at Auschwitz than a simple soldier. Note that when the Vietnamese invaded and threw out the KR in 79, he fled with the KR, not from them. And now he is a successful local official in Anlong Veng, one of the last KR strongholds, which means he was ranking KR right to the bitter end, probably until 1998 when that group defected to the government en masse. This guy's no victim. He directly participated in the torture and execution of more than 14,000 people, many of them children and women. And he did his job well. And he stayed loyal to the group who did this for another 19 years. Screw him.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your thinking.

Fools nothing justifies his actions, yet history tells us that given similar circumstances the vast majority of us would act the same. Remember he was nine years old when "recruited" into the KR, sixteen when sent to China for photography school. I also agree Cambodia should have dealt with it's past about twenty five years ago.

Fools, I'm not sure how useful it is to condemn the photographer: if you think the KR were just some strange aberration that can be explained in terms of the evil nature of the individuals involved, it doesn't really mean anything. If you get a chance, try to read the memoirs of Albert Speers, Hitler's architect and personal friend: the impression he gives of the inner circle is not of a bunch of evil geniuses, but of fairly typical petit bourgeoise Germans, quite a few of whom found Hitler's obsession with the Jews slightly embarrassing. In fact, Speers mentions the Jews exactly twice in his memoirs: there's one tight little paragraph where he admits that a friend had been to Auschwitz and had been very shocked to see it. He advised Speers never, ever to go near the place, for his own sake. Speers, by the way, was responsible for arms production towards the end of the war, using slave labor from the camps to produce them.

Or closer to home, read The Gate. The author was a prisoner of Duch, the man now on trial, and formed quite a close relationship with him: he described Duch as an awkward, idealistic man with a strong sense of right and wrong. In fact, Duch worked quite hard to have him released and freed, rather than executed, because he was convinced that Bizot was innocent of being a CIA spy or any other such.