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Those Pesky Photographs
by Jim Babka
May 13, 2004The federal government is very concerned about privacy – their privacy, not yours. No one is more concerned about the intrusiveness of cameras than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is.
When a serviceman or servicewoman is killed in action, and they're brought home to their families in flag-draped coffins, the affair is supposed to be private. Allegedly it is unpatriotic to take pictures of their flag draped coffin. The Rumsfeld-led Pentagon cracks down on such acts quickly.
And on Wednesday, Rumsfeld said that in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, he had concerns about privacy issues – concerns about violating the Geneva Convention by releasing photos that show prisoners being humiliated.
Flag draped coffins
When a police officer is killed in the line of duty, his or her photo is immediately sprayed all over television and the newspapers. It's not uncommon to see those flag draped coffins. That's because no one is going to call for an end to our fight against crime when a law enforcement officer is killed.
When a politician is assassinated, as John F. Kennedy was, it is not considered shameful in any way to photograph his flag draped coffin.
But when a soldier is killed, fighting on foreign soil, in a cause that appears to have nothing at all to do with defending our Constitution, then the photos of flag draped coffins must be banned – for the sake of the family's privacy, of course.
- Are we to assume that the family is embarrassed?
- Do they want the death of their son or daughter/brother or sister to be kept a secret?
- Should the work that their children/sibling committed gave their life for be kept under a bushel?
Koppel v. Fox News
Everyone, especially Republicans, are well aware that Fox is the Republican News Network. Rumsfeld-style concern for privacy has spread to Fox News as well.
On his Sunday morning program Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace countered what he saw as an anti-war message on ABC's Nightline. Nightline Anchor Ted Koppel had devoted 40 minutes to reading the names of more than 700 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq since the invasion last year in a tribute called, "The Fallen."
Wallace, a former ABC News reporter who used to do duty as a sub on Nightline, says he was offended. "I take Ted at his word that he did not intend it as a rating stunt or to be an anti-war statement, but I think it became that way," said Wallace.
- Apparently, the dead of this war are so expendable that they are to be forgotten as soon as they die.
- And applying the Wallace standard, maybe we should close the Vietnam and Pearl Harbor Memorials, for they too list their dead.
Government privacy in prison
Forgive me my over-suspicious mind, but I don't buy it when Rumsfeld says he doesn't know yet if what happened at the Abu Ghraib prison was an anomaly -- or "systemic," as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has suggested.
The pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison are telling more than the proverbial 1,000 words. They seem to imply, even if Rumsfeld's slow-moving investigation cannot yet confirm or deny, that the MPs working in the prison believed they were doing what their superiors wanted. So proud were they of their work, they took pictures of it.
Keep in mind that this is coming from the very same man who approved the worldwide broadcast of an unkempt and recently captured Saddam Hussein getting an oral exam.
- Has Rumsfeld suddenly had a "Road to Damascus" experience about the Geneva Convention?
- Or is it the embarrassment and difficulty those photos have caused him that really has suddenly turned him into the Pentagon's ACLU representative?
Geneva Convention – humbug
It's atypical for a Republican to really appreciate the Geneva Convention. It has a mamby-pamby, touchy-feely liberal feel to it with things like respect for prisoner's dignity and rights. And it might be easy to forget, but rethinking the topic of torture as a legitimate tool in the war on terror was discussed openly two years ago by several conservative columnists, not to mention liberal Alan Dershowitz.
We're at war, the Rush Limbaugh's of the world argue. War is nasty business and we can't just expect our soldiers to shut off their fear, anger, and loathing of the people who are trying to kill them.
Indeed we can't – which is why we shouldn't have gone there and attempted regime change in the first place.
Truth shall make you free
The real damage these photos do is to the ill- advised policy of preemptive war. Somehow President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz got it into their heads that the Vietnam experience was an aberration. Perhaps it was the butt-kicking they gave Hussein in the first go-round.
But they remember the drumbeat of coffin photos and lists of the returning dead during the Vietnam era. They remember Walter Cronkite's Chinese-water torture of the Carter Administration – daily announcing the number of days hostages had been held in Iran. Those news reports broke the back of those administrations.
Those reports could do the same thing to this administration. And they should because it is the only way we can Downsize DC.
This policy was built on a stack of lies about weapons of mass destruction. Now we're learning that even our most noble motivations of delivering a better, safer, and freer democracy to Iraq is also built on sand.
This war was entered into without the wisdom of counting the cost in advance. Even Republicans are now starting to complain that the team of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld seems aimless.
War is the health of the State. Having won the Cold War, the Rumsfeld's of the world needed, at any cost, a new war. It is the War on Terrorism that has cost us this expensive, deadly foreign policy debacle in Iraq, the creation of a vast new cabinet-level bureaucracy, and the loss of our civil liberties.
Frankly, I'm not concerned about Rumsfeld's form of privacy. Keep the photos coming! They tell the truth and the truth shall set us free.
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