"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), American civil rights leader
Recently, the American Enterprise Institute hosted an event featuring five Saddam-era torture victims who had their right hands amputated as punishment for alleged crimes against the old Iraqi regime. A transcript of this meeting can be found here.
In addition to the presentations of the five Iraqis, a video of some of the atrocities committed by Saddam's followers at the Abu Ghraib prison was shown to those attending--shown to those who could bear to watch it, that is. Deborah Orin, the New York Post's Washington Bureau Chief, was one of the half-dozen journalists present at the AEI event. Her observations are recorded in her op-ed, "Reporting for the Enemy."
"The video only lasts four minutes or so--gruesome scenes of torture from the days when Saddam Hussein's thugs ruled Abu Ghraib prison. I couldn't bear to watch, so I walked out until it was over. Some who stayed wished they hadn't. They told of savage scenes of decapitation, fingers chopped off one by one, tongues hacked out with a razor blade--all while victims shriek in pain and the thugs chant Saddam's praises."
She wonders why so few journalists attended this particular AEI briefing when other events sponsored by the think-tank are generally standing room only affairs, then surmises that the sparse attendance was because the video AEI showed was just too unbearable to watch. How those reporters who failed to show would know how unbearable it was having never watched it escapes me. I'm more inclined to believe they didn't want to be bothered with news that would interrupt their continuing attention to the U.S. offenses at Abu Ghraib, so they ignored AEI's invitation. Whatever.
She goes on to suggest that the lack of publicity given these atrocities by our media "raises a very complex problem in the War on Terror." That problem, she says, is that we more vigorously highlight our own wrongdoings than we do the terrible things Saddam's people did. Why? Because they are less appalling and therefore more acceptable for airing on our evening news. In the world of propaganda, our enemies one-up us by doing things that are so horrific that our media won't air the gory details.
"Media analysts like Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler admit it sounds 'sanctimonious' to justify publishing prison abuse photos--but not al Qaeda beheading videos--in the name of showing 'the reality of war.' But that is just what he did.
AEI spokeswoman Veronique Rodman, puzzled by the minimal interest in the Saddam torture video, is sure that if it was a video of equally horrific torture committed by U.S. troops, the press would find ways to show or report it.
Reporters have to face up to the fact that right now, if we highlight the wrongs that Americans commit but not--out of squeamishness--the far worse horrors committed by others, we become propaganda tools for the other side."
Orin closes with a reference to the Iraqi torture victims mentioned earlier in this post:
"Saddam's torture videos may be too awful to show, but it's hard to explain the low media interest in the story of seven Iraqi men who had their right hands chopped off by Saddam's thugs--and then got new prosthetic arms and new hope in America. They're eloquent, they're available, they're grateful for the U.S. liberation of Iraq. No one can better talk about Saddam's tortures--and no one is more eager to do so. Yet, as of yesterday, the New York Times had written 177 stories on Abu Ghraib--with over 40 on the front page. The self-proclaimed "paper of record" hadn't written a single story about those seven Iraqi men."
We're legitimately bent out of shape about what a few of our misguided soldiers did to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but these seven guys and thousands of their fellow countrymen? Who cares?
I do.
Update: Nick Schulz, editor of TechCentralStation, has more on the Saddam torture videos and the media's lack of coverage of them over at National Review Online. You may want to take a look. Sobering indeed.
2 comments:
Me too, Ron. But like I've said before the liberal, left-wing media have their own not so hidden agenda. It too was summed up in the article..."Because most [journalists] want Bush to lose," says AEI scholar Michael Ledeen, who helped host the screening of the Saddam video.
They'd do anything to this country and us to accomplish their objectives. Wow, sounds like a terrorist group to me. Humm....
NO ONE has ever disputed that Saddam was evil incarnate. He is a horrible example of mankind. That being acknowledged, what we did is doubly inexcusable. We proclaim ourselves far above that. We hold up the light of freedom for everyone to see. For us not to set a stellar example of how things should be done, with everything open and aboveboard for the Red Cross and the world to see, is not taking advantage of the propaganda war that would go a long way in winning friends in that wartorn area. How could we secrete prisoners and justify doing anything that made anyone we were in charge of, less than? Passing this off as the "actions of a "few low-level soldiers" isn't even worthy of the breath it takes to say it either. Come on, people. Wake up! We may not be Saddam, but we aren't US either.
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