THE IMAGES WE SEE -- AND THOSE WE DON'T
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
Thursday, May 13, 2004
The death of Nicholas Berg is a horror. It is a bitter, brutal reminder of why we are at war -- something that much of America's political and media elite, in their binge of outrage and apology over the Abu Ghraib abuses, have lately seemed all too willing to forget.
I don't for a moment minimize the awfulness of what some American soldiers did to their Iraqi captives in that prison. Their offenses may have fallen far short of the savagery that Abu Ghraib was notorious for under Saddam Hussein, but in their cruelty and urge to humiliate, and in the sadistic glee with which they posed for those obscene photographs, they reek of the depravity we went to Iraq to uproot. As one who believes that this war was necessary above all on moral grounds, I'm sickened by what they did.
But I'm sickened as well by the relish with which this scandal is being exploited by those who think the defeat of the Bush administration is an end that justifies just about any means. I'm sickened by the recklessness of the media, which relentlessly flogged the graphic images from Abu Ghraib, giving them an in-your-face prominence that couldn't help but exaggerate their impact. And I'm sickened by the thought of how much damage this feeding frenzy may have done to the war effort.
We do remember the war effort, don't we? Surely we haven't forgotten the jetliners smashing into the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and 3,000 innocents dying in a single morning. Or the monstrous Saddam, who filled mass graves to bursting, invaded two neighboring countries, and avidly sought weapons of mass destruction. Or the reason why 130,000 US soldiers are on the line in Iraq: because establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East is critical to cutting off the terrorists' oxygen -- the backing of dictatorial regimes.
My sense is that the public *hasn't*lost sight of any of this. But for weeks now, a goodly swath of the chattering class has been treating the war as little more than a rhetorical backdrop against which to score political points or increase market share.
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, for instance, reacted to the Abu Ghraib revelations with a column urging the Democratic presidential candidate to milk the moment for all it was worth. "If ever there was a moment for John Kerry to come out swinging, this is it," she wrote. "It is the biggest story of the war, and he is essentially silent." There are many thoughtful things one might say about Abu Ghraib, but only someone eager for the US campaign in Iraq to fail and George W. Bush to be defeated could possibly describe it as "the biggest story of the war."
In any case, the Kerry campaign has hardly been silent on the prison scandal. It is using it as a fundraising hook, sending out mass e-mails urging supporters to petition for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation -- and to donate money to the Kerry campaign.
Poor Nick Berg. The anybody-but-Bush crowd isn't going to rush to publicize his terrible fate with anything like the zeal it brought to the abused-prisoners story. CBS and the New Yorker couldn't resist the temptation to shove the Abu Ghraib photos into the public domain -- and the rest of the media then made sure the world saw them over and over and over. But when it comes to video and stills of Al Qaeda murderers severing Berg's head with a knife and brandishing it in triumph for the camera, the Fourth Estate is suddenly squeamish.
As I write on Wednesday afternoon, the CBS News web site continues to offer a complete "photo essay" of naked Iraqi men being humiliated by Americans in a variety of poses. But the video of Berg's beheading, CBS says, "is too gruesome to show." No other network and no newspaper that I have seen shows the gory pictures, either.
What exactly is the governing rule here? That incendiary images sure to enrage our enemies and get more Americans killed should be published, while images that show the world just how evil those enemies really are should be suppressed? Offensive and shocking pictures that undermine the war effort should be played up, but offensive and shocking pictures that remind us why we're at war in the first place shouldn't get played at all?
Yes, Virginia, there really is a gaping media double standard. News organizations will shield your tender eyes from the sight of a Berg or a Daniel Pearl being decapitated or of Sept. 11 victims jumping to their deaths, or of the mangled bodies on the USS Cole, or of Fallujans joyfully mutilating the remains of four lynched US civilians. But they will make sure you don't miss the odious behavior of Americans or American allies, no matter how atypical that misbehavior may be, or how determined the US military is to uproot and punish it.
We are at war with a vicious enemy, and propaganda in wartime is a weapon whose consequences can be deadly. Nick Berg lost his life because the Abu Ghraib pictures were turned into a worldwide media event. Yes, those who did it were sheltered by the First Amendment. That makes their actions not better, but worse.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)
"We do remember the war effort, don't we? Surely we haven't forgotten the jetliners smashing into the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and 3,000 innocents dying in a single morning. Or the monstrous Saddam, who filled mass graves to bursting, invaded two neighboring countries, and avidly sought weapons of mass destruction. Or the reason why 130,000 US soldiers are on the line in Iraq: because establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East is critical to cutting off the terrorists' oxygen -- the backing of dictatorial regimes."
-Hey, moron, even president Bush has admitted that Hussein and Iraq had no connection to Al Queda or Bin Laden. Hussein's only offenses (that were not either backed by the US or fought by the US) were against his own people, and while horrible, are not a threat to the US in any way.
"establishing a democratic beachhead in the Middle East is critical to cutting off the terrorists' oxygen -- the backing of dictatorial regimes."
-Yeah, let me give you a quote: "Afganistan will be a shining beacon of democracy in the middle east". That was George W. Bush. Is Afganistan a beacon of democracy? NO. We have ignored Afganistan in favor of Iraq, where we have no right to be in the first place.
What an excellent article. Seems we Americans forget too easily who the good guys and bad guys are. (For those still confused: We're the good guys.)
I'm not sickened by the Abu Ghraib photos. I'm sickened that some traitor released them to the press and releived to learn that we have some secret locations left (other than Iraq) where real information extraction means are still in place. Otherwise normal people whose veins now flow with the blood of human kindness for the Islamic killers in Iraq couldn't care less about the INNOCENTS there who were REALLY being methodically tortured, and slaughtered, in the thousands by Saddam Hussein and the rest of his sadistic crime family--"Hey, those offenses were only against his OWN people, not us--so who CARES?"
The constant revolting display ad nauseam of the Abu Ghraib "abuse" photos has people up in arms that the prisoners there (all of whom would be deliriously happy for everyone reading this and all your families to be slowly burned to death and to listen with delight to their pitiful screams of horrible writhing agony) were spoken to in an insulting fashion; demeaned; isolated from their friends and family; deprived of sleep; given food that was less than delicious; made to be naked in front of other guys; forced to do meaningless tasks by someone they don't like; frightened; forced to stand still for a long time in the same position; and basically led around on a leash.
That stuff is just another day at the office for our guys in uniform, who go through it routinely with a sense of duty to protect your right to whine. Get over it. These fanatical fruitcakes want us all (that's the whole country, every American man, woman and child) DEAD. Slowly, if possible. If the roles were reversed, American prisoners would be TRULY tortured and then killed. Calling these staged fraternity prank photos "torture" is an insult to all POWs who really DO get tortured.
I agree that the photos of Berg and Pearl being executed in cold blood and the terrified victims of 9/11 leaping to their deaths and the Fallujans celebrating as they incinerated the four lynched Americans and mutilated their corpses should be given equal, if not MORE, airplay in the US and the rest of the free world. Doing so would help remind the slow-witted among us who the bad guys really are, and why they must be eradicated by any means necessary. But civilians might die. Yes, they're doing it right now, and the bad guys (the ones using their "religion" as an excuse to commit mass murder) are growing in ranks daily. WWII was ended by America's president, her people and their resolve to do whatever it takes, no matter what, even if lots of people die as they usually do in war. If the news media and prevailing attitudes they cultivate in America now had been in power back then, nobody trying to read this would be able to, since it's not in German.
Try to remember 9/11 and all the inocent people that were violently murdered and mutilated there, through no fault of their own. The ones who did it and the ones who did the Cole, the first WTC bombing, the executions of Pearl and Berg, and who are doing it to us now in Iraq DO share a very prominent common feature: They subscribe to a "religious belief", indistinguishable from a murderous cult, which holds that you and I and everyone in our nation are Satan. They want us all dead. If 30,000,000 innocent men, women and children instead of 3000 had been slaughtered on 9/11, they would be 1000 times happier, whether they happen to be Iraqi, Saudi, Yemeni, Syrian, Irani, Afghan, Indonesian, Pakistani, Jordanian, Egyptian, Sudanese, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Somali or none of the above. Nationality doesn't matter this time as it did with Japan and Nazi Germany. This time, it's a sick, twisted, phony religious ideology. Please try to remember all Muslims are not like this, and remember who the bad guys are.
Posted by: Henri at May 26, 2004 09:13 AM