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Sun 9 May, 2004 11:42 am
PEGGY NOONAN
A Humiliation for America
Why the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is so disheartening.
Thursday, May 6, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Are reports of abuse by Americans at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison hyped and sensationalized? Probably. The world media are in the sensation-making business and it's a world-wide story. Did the abuses occur? Obviously. There are pictures, testimony, an apology Wednesday from the U.S. general who now runs the prisons and denunciations of the abuse as "un-American," (Donald Rumsfeld) and "not the America I know" (George W. Bush). Is the scandal an inspiration to our enemies? Most assuredly. Were the acts acceptable? Of course not. Must they be investigated and justice meted out? Yes, and surely will be.
It was necessary that President Bush go on Arab TV, announce the investigations, and swear that justice would be pursued. But there is no getting around that this is all good news for our foes in a time of war. Violent Islamic extremists will be happy at the propaganda boon and delighted to see their convictions of American depravity illustrated and seemingly legitimized before the world.
How disheartening is it for those who are not our foes? Let us count the ways.
1. It is what it is on the face of it--cruel and unusual treatment of enemy combatants or detainees by those who represent and fight for our country.
2. It forces us to think that some Americans are capable of this. This is demoralizing.
3. The scandal can and will be used by the mischievous and malicious at home and abroad to attempt to tarnish the character of the troops we've so come to respect and feel grateful for. This is most unjust. These men and women have enough troubles. We already ask them to be warrior/peacekeeper/cop/doctor/diplomat, and they shouldn't have to worry about this.
4. The scandal suggests to the world that there are a (small) number of U.S. troops who are capable of these actions, which is mortifying, and which gives rise to a defensive, "That is not who we are." As indeed it is not. The humiliators could hardly have more heavily humiliated their country.
Because we are a free-press, free-expression nation in the media age, we tell the world our sins. Many will not receive the latest in a way that involves jumping up and down and exclaiming, "See the fruits of free inquiry, what a country!" Publication of the photos and reports we've seen so far inflames our enemies in a time of active war. This is a danger to us. At some point down the road some terrorist will testify that it was the picture of his masked and naked countrymen posing behind them that sealed his commitment to jihad. And yet there is no way around this. In fact this scandal is like a little metaphor for the Iraq experience itself: Whatever your opinion was, there's now no way round it but through it.
The best we can do is what we've done and had no choice but to do: Reveal these things for all the world to see. Redress, reform, repair, reprimand and remove.
I find that I cannot shake a memory of something I read years ago in one of Shirley MacLaine's memoirs. The work of Ms. MacLaine might seem an odd thing to reference here, but bear with me. I write from memory. She was a young movie star. It was the 1950s. She had appeared in a film that was at least implicitly critical of the United States. She came under fire from some critics: Why can't you people in Hollywood be more positive? Your work encourages anti-American propaganda. She didn't think this was true, but she wasn't exactly a world-class thinker so it didn't matter. What did matter is what she threw away at the end of her story. She went to an international film festival and talked with an anti-American intellectual. He told her something like, "The first time I ever thought maybe your country was something special was when I saw your movie and saw how critical Hollywood is allowed to be. You must really have some kind of freedom."
When I read this I believed it, and still do. You do reveal something about yourself by telling uncomfortable truths. You reveal good faith. You reveal that you're trying to get it right. This is not so terrible. It is something the dim might miss, but the intelligent are likely to get. And God bless this earth, there are a lot of intelligent people.
The president said of the U.S. on Arab TV that "we have nothing to hide." He no doubt meant there are things that we would wish to hide, but that we refuse to.
But let's not get too optimistic. The most distressing of the scandal photos is, to me, the one of an American woman, a GI, who is laughing, holding a cigarette and aiming her fingers as if comically shooting or aiming at a group of prisoners, presumably Iraqi. They are naked and hooded. She looks coarse, cruel, perhaps drunk. And as I looked at her I thought Oh, no. This is not equality but mutual degradation. Can anyone imagine a WAC of 1945, or a WAVE of 1965, acting in this manner? I can't. Because WACs and WAVEs were not only members of the American armed forces, which responsibility brought its own demands in terms of dignity and bearing; they were women. They apparently did not think they had to prove they were men, or men at their worst. I've never seen evidence to suggest the old-time WACs and WAVEs had to delve down into some coarse and vulgar part of their nature to fit in, to show they were one of the guys, as tough as the guys, as ugly at their ugliest.
But the young woman soldier in the scandal photo--she looked, shall we say, confused about these issues. It was chilling. Perhaps we should be worrying about that, too.
"Are reports of abuse by Americans at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison hyped and sensationalized? Probably. The world media are in the sensation-making business and it's a world-wide story." Peggy Noonan
Has 40 years of monthly peroxide use finally destroyed Noonan's brain cells? Definitely.
Numerous examples of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghraib:
-Threatening with a 9 mm pistol.
-Pouring cold water on naked detainees.
-Threatening males with rape.
-Beating with a broom handle and a chair.
-Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
-Threatening with military dogs.
-Attaching wires to extremities, including the penis.
-Accusing prisoners of being homosexual.
-Forcing detainees into compromising positions while naked.
Source: Washington Post
Only a radical, right-wingnut maven riding an agenda could say with a straight face the abuses at Abu Ghraib were "hyped and sensationalized."
But then again, according to Rush Limbaugh, the MP's were "just blowing off steam."
infowarrior
infowarrior, the events were hyped and sensationalized, as they appropriately deserved to be. Finally the Media is doing the job they should have been doing for years.
I recall that Rumsfeld reported during his congressional testimony that the Pentagon had made a public announcement that there were reports of prisoner abuse in January 2004. Their quiet little announcements was barely picked up by the main stream Media and few people remembered the story. Want to bet that is why the Pentagon handled it that way, to cover their butts while not stirring up the public? Nah, they wouldn't do that, would they?
BBB
Interesting post.
What I find to be the most "disheartening" aspect of this entire situation is how many people don't fully understand how badly these photos infuriate people from those cultures in the Middle East.
A woman holding a leash connected to a naked Iraqi on the floor? Whoa.
A woman pointing and smiling at the genitals of lined up nude Iraqi men? Holy crap!
Making Iraqi men wear womens underwear? Who's bright idea was THAT?
I can understand "roughing up" some prisoners when you want to get info from them (lets be real here). But doing things like that have a particularly damning effect on us.
Unfortunately, I understand that there are more photos that have yet to be released (possibly showing even worse treatment...lets hope not).
This is going to get SO much worse before it gets any better. Lets keep our fingers crossed.
JustanObserver
JustanObserver, welcome to Able@Know, glad to have you here.
Your response is widely felt. You may wish to join the discussion on the following topic about what may be yet to come.
BumbleBeeBoogie
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=24451&start=0
BBB is sadly mistaken.
Court martials don't grow out of hyped and sensationalized events.
Deecups
I disagree Deecups, the court martials are arising from the Media's attention to the leaked photos and the publicity surrounding them.
The Military would have taken care of the matter in-house (read that cover it up) had it not been for the hype of the photos. Certainly, the photos made more of an impact than the general's report about the abuses and the military ignored the abuse reports made by human rights organizations, including the Red Cross.
In this latest incidence, the military could not cover up and punish the whistle blower as it did in the following story, which is only one of many incidences. ---BBB
CBS 60 Minutes 5/9/04
An American Hero
May 9, 2004
Hugh Thompson
Former helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson was finally honored decades after saving defenseless Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. (Photo: CBS)
"I saved the people because I wasn't taught to murder and kill. I can't answer for the people who took part in it. I apologize for the ones that did." Hugh Thompson
(CBS) President Bush was "shocked, and appalled" by what American soldiers did to Iraqi POWs.
Now, meet an American hero who says he felt the same way more than 30 years ago in a different American war: Vietnam.
Hugh Thompson was a helicopter pilot in 1968, on a day American soldiers gunned down more than 500 unarmed civilians in a village called My Lai.
The dead were women, old men and children. And even more of them would have died if Thompson had not confronted his fellow soldiers, stopped their murderous rampage and airlifted a number of civilians to safety. Correspondent Mike Wallace reports.
For years, the U.S. military tried to cover up the My Lai massacre. And Hugh Thompson was treated not as a hero, but as a traitor. But this past March, all that changed for Thompson, at a special ceremony in Nashville, Tenn.
It was a night Thompson never dreamed would happen. For years, he'd been treated as an outcast, a turncoat, because he had dared to question his fellow American GIs who said they were just following orders.
But this night, at last, he was being honored and inducted into an elite fraternity, The Army Aviation Hall of Fame: "As an OH-23 pilot with the 123rd Aviation Battalion, CWO Hugh Thompson flew over the Vietnamese village of My Lai on March 16, 1968, as U.S. troops were killing civilians."
That day back in 1968 was truly barbaric. Young, inexperienced American troops, told by their leaders that My Lai was an enemy stronghold, rounded up civilians, burned down their huts and then shot hundreds of them down in cold blood.
Thompson, believing at first it was a legitimate combat operation, was flying his small chopper over My Lai that day, trying to draw enemy fire away from the American GIs on the ground. But there was no enemy fire.
When he saw the piles of bodies, he felt sick and ashamed. What happened was so shocking, so inconceivable, that 60 Minutes asked Thompson and his gunner, Larry Colburn, to go back with us to Vietnam and explain it all to us for a story in 1998.
Thompson told 60 Minutes he landed his chopper near a rice paddy, and while his crew covered him with M-60 machine guns, he managed to save some civilians from being murdered. But he says he could not stop others from being gunned down even after they had been marched into a ditch.
Approximately 170 people were marched down in there, including women, old men, babies. And GIs stood up on the side with their weapons on full automatic and machine gun fire.
"There were no weapons captured. There were no draft-age males killed. They were civilians," says Colburn, referring to the ditch filled with bodies. "It was full
some of the people were still, they were dying, they weren't all dead."
As Thompson and Colburn were recalling the horrors of that day for 60 Minutes, an elderly woman walked toward us. She said that she had been dumped in the ditch back in 1968, but had survived, shielded by the bodies of the dead and the dying.
"Sorry we couldn't help you that day," says Thompson to the woman.
She said she wanted to know why there were so many villagers killed that day - and why Thompson was different from the rest of the Americans?
"I saved the people because I wasn't taught to murder and kill. I can't answer for the people who took part in it," says Thompson. "I apologize for the ones that did. I just wished we could have helped more people that day."
In fact, they did help more people. Thompson and Colburn found nine or 10 villagers cowering in a bunker. They radioed for a couple of choppers, which airlifted all of them to safety.
60 Minutes managed to find two of the women they'd saved. Mrs. Nhung, who was 73 at the time, was 43 when she was rescued. Mrs. Nhang was only 6.
"Didn't you take your life in your hands, Hugh, when you got out and told the American soldiers who had been killing that they'd better quit and let these people get out of the bunker," Wallace asked Thompson, who wouldn't answer.
"Yes sir, he did," says Colburn. "And he didn't even take a weapon with him. He had a side arm. He didn't even have it drawn. He just placed himself
And I was thinking that, at that point, anything could have happened. And we watched Mr. Thompson go to the bunker and bring the people out."
"There was just no value whatsoever on life," says Thompson.
Wallace reminded the two men about another woman they tried to warn as they hovered just above her in their chopper. An Army photographer had taken her picture.
"We saw her in the tall grass and
I motioned for her to stay," says Colburn. "I was hoping she wouldn't be detected. When we came back, she was in this condition.
There's a big difference between killing in war and murder. Cold-blooded murder."
"What do you call it when you march 100 or 200 people down in a ditch and line up on the side with machines and start firing into it," asks Thompson. "Reminds me of another story that happened in World War II, like the Nazis."
Stunned by what he had seen that day, Thompson reported back to his superiors.
But from the very beginning, the military tried to cover up the massacre. And that wasn't all. Thompson is uncomfortable talking about it, but before the Hall of Fame ceremony in Nashville, he and Colburn told 60 Minutes that the U.S. military had stopped providing him with adequate back-up on his chopper missions after My Lai.
"He was placed in a very precarious position as far as the missions that he was carrying out," says Colburn. "He didn't have any adequate cover in my opinion. Instead of being followed by two armed gun ships, he had another scout helicopter."
Scout helicopters are not equipped with the machine guns and rockets carried by the larger Huey gun ships.
"It seemed like he was really going out on a limb when he was going out without adequate cover," says Colburn.
How many choppers did he lose? "I think three or four, something like that," says Thompson.
Actually, Thompson crashed a total of five times. And the last time, he broke his back.
Why has none of this ever been told before? "I don't know," says Thompson. "I just sorta like went underground. I didn't mention it to anybody."
Thompson may have clammed up, but word of what he had done followed him when he returned from Vietnam to the United States. And he kept paying a price for turning on his fellow soldiers at My Lai.
"I'd received death threats over the phone," says Thompson. "We didn't have caller ID. But it was scary. Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up. So I was not a good guy."
He said that when he went to the Officer's Club, there would be "100 people in there after work, and five minutes after I was there, you know, it seemed like it was me and the bartender left."
"This was because the truth, I don't think, was out there. This was, I was somebody that was crying and whining about a few people getting accidentally killed," says Thompson. "There was no accidental killing that day. It was murder."
But when Thompson testified about those murders to Congress in 1970, his testimony was kept secret. He says they didn't want the story out: "Well, not when one of the senior Congressmen here in the secret testimony say if anybody goes to jail that day, it'll be that helicopter pilot."
With the truth hidden away, Thompson admits he felt very much alone. For years, he remained silent about My Lai. The military, meanwhile, continued to give him the cold shoulder.
But that began to change shortly after our story aired on 60 Minutes. To begin with, the military service academies started inviting him to visit and give lectures on military ethics to young soldiers.
And Thompson began to open up as he told those soldiers unforgettable stories about My Lai: "A lot of the girls didn't scream too much because they had already cut their tongues out. A bayonet can kill two real quick if they're pregnant. It got nasty that day. I personally, I mean, I wish I was a big enough man to say I forgive them, but I swear to God, I can't."
He says he continues to lecture at West Point and the Naval Academy, trying to tell today's troops "to be a soldier and act like a soldier."
The tide turned some more when the Pentagon finally recognized Thompson, Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, their crewmate who died in Vietnam after My Lai. All three were awarded the prestigious Soldier's Medal.
But 30 years had passed since the massacre, and Thompson says it was strangely unsatisfying. Too late, he says, from a reluctant military leadership.
But he felt far different on the stage in Nashville, as he was inducted on the first ballot into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame.
He says it's a big honor. "This is my peers electing me to put me in there," says Thompson. "This is my fellow aviators. And that makes me feel good."
Re: infowarrior
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:infowarrior, the events were hyped and sensationalized, as they appropriately deserved to be. Finally the Media is doing the job they should have been doing for years.
Interesting.. So is it ok for the media to "hype" and "sensationalize" as long as you argee with what they are pushing?
fishin
Shame, fishin, you should know me well enough by now not to try to tag me with that accusation. You should know I'm not a down the line, knee jerk left wing chauvinist.
I assume you well know the Media's supposed obligation to protect the public's interests against that of oppressive government and others. The Media often touts its nobility in that respect but too frequently does not live up to that ideal. When the Media hypes government policies that harm the public, its action is suspect.
For the last three years, one had to search hard to find the post-9/11 Media questioning and challenging of the government policies that have gotten us into the Iraq mess. Having come to its senses and escaping the hype of gung-ho patriotism and war babble, the Media is finally doing its real job. To question and challenge government, not behave in a chauvinistic manner.
BBB
I didn't "tag" you with anything.
You made this comment earlier
Quote:infowarrior, the events were hyped and sensationalized, as they appropriately deserved to be. Finally the Media is doing the job they should have been doing for years.
and now you posted:
Quote:I assume you well know the Media's supposed obligation to protect the public's interests against that of oppressive government and others. The Media often touts its nobility in that respect but too frequently does not live up to that ideal. When the Media hypes government policies that harm the public, its action is suspect.
How can you proclaim that the media hyping a story is "doing the job they should have been doing"? Hyping a story is hyping a story. They aren't supposed to do it no matter which way the hype leans.
fishin
fishin, who says the Media should NEVER hype a story? What kind of story should NEVER be hyped?
BBB
Disclosure is not hype -- these are two completely different things.
For two years on the world has been told by your president that the American presence in Iraq had everything to do with bringing democratic ideals and principles to the once-oppressed Iraqi people.
Now we learn the oppression in Iraq is alive and well and its nexus is located in Abu Ghraib.
Noonan's spin is as familiar as rain.
One of the more intriguing (and bewildering) aspects of all this is the existence of all the damning photos. Did anyone involved think this little secret would remain that way with so many photos flying around? Did these idiots want to be caught?
I find that aspect curious, to say the least...
Methinks those pics were considered "trophies". Apparently there is another batch due out that star Little Lindie and her boyfriend having sex in front of some of the prisoners. She's quite the little exhibishonist from what I hear.
Well, then, let me say I am sorry to hear that.
Peggy Noonan once wrote that the 'pranks' of the departing white house staff (the 'w's torn from all the typewriters, the garbage left strew everywhere - rumors which were later shown to be either completely false, or in the case of garbage bags, had been left by maintenance/renovation crews) proved that "The Clintons were at heart vandals"
Or, on another occasion, Peggy told us, "Neither she [Hilary] nor Bill loves America. They don't want the presidency to help the country but to use it as a platform to power."
The media, Peggy hasn't been terribly fond of. An exception, "As I watched television I became aware...that the great leaders of our time of trauma were the reporters and anchors and producers of the networks and news stations." That was after sept 11, of course.
Peggy, a former speech writer for Reagan, can be counted on to heave all responsibility for the abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan down on a few privates, as she does above.
Yes, indeed, Mr. Blatham. Noonan has been outrageous in her defense of the indefensible such as her protection of President Bush.
However, she has been vicious as seen in her commentary concerning Mrs. Clinton. Noonan wrote that when Mrs. Clinton completed her interview with Matt Lauer indicating that her husband's troubles were due to the right wing conspiracy, she returned to the White House and told her friend Linda Bloodworth-"That will teach them to f*ck with us".
Noonan would never put these words in the mouth of Laura Bush. Noonan is a hopeless partisan.
mporter
Thanks, that's a quote I had not bumped into.
David Brock has hurt his own credibility through confessing to a cornucopia of previous purposeful falsehoods, but the claims he makes regarding the 'right wing' media (his previous lies were promulagated while working within it, and at the behest of it) reflect something quite real and factual, and which is supported by much documentary evidence and objective analysis (see Alterman's 'What Liberal Media' and the author's voluminous end notes).
Brock has a piece on Salon today...
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/05/11/noise/index.html
One point he makes here is that even if Bush were to lose the next election, any Dem administration in place after November can expect concerted attack, of the sort which the Clinton administration faced.
or the sort that the Bush administration has been facing for 3.5 years.
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