Threadnapping: What is a Buttmuffin ? 
I agree with this. I think the amount of scrutiny placed upon the chain of command, the disbelief expressed at being unaware of prisoner treatment protocol under the Geneva Convention, and the general public disgust will speed changes in a way they might not have had the photos not been published. I think some aspects of it look counterproductive, but I think the long term will outweigh that.
What interests me most about this discussion is that it indicates just how much the country has changed in the last ten years. No one bothered to consider the political consequences of showing the american soldiers being dragged in the streets in Somalia. And yet now people question whether it was even appropriate to read the names of soldiers who died in Iraq on Nightline. In fact, one media company refused to air the show.
The question is no longer whether we are deserving of the truth but rather whether the broadcast of a news item comforts the enemy. It appears to me that once we accept the notion that some truths are unacceptable to show because of the political consequences, we have begun to undermine the democratic process. Rather than serving as a watchdog, the press instead serves to protect the interests of the government. If this is the case, how do we know whether the government is actually serving in our best interest? And at what point do the news broadcasts become propaganda machines for the ruling party?
I acknowledge that the press is fickle and can turn on any group in heartbeat. Nonetheless, we are left with a press that considers the political consequences of a story before it values its newsworthiness. To some people, that may be more important. I, however, would rather have a news media that reports the truth, no matter how ugly it might be.
Let me try to make a point here.
The one thing a commander of soldiers fears and, if he is any good at all, strives to prevent is the moment his disciplined, trained soldiers cease to be a military organization and become an armed mob. That is true whether the commander leads a rifle team or commands a theater of operations. It is all the worse when subordinate commanders are the leaders of the mob. That is precisely what happened in Vietnam at MiLei – a whole battalion turned into an armed mob free of the restraint of discipline or law or simple humanity. On a lesser scale that is what happened in the Iraqi prison. It is a shameful thing and in hind sight when the passion of the moment passes, the participants know that; that is precisely why the participants don’t talk about it and try to keep it secret.
While commanders fear the loss of control, what they abhor is the disclosure of a loss of control that they have tried to keep secret. The last response is to such a disclosure is to acknowledge that their people have run amuck and that they tried to keep a lid on it. Their first response is to deny that it ever happened, followed by an effort to rationalize the havoc as a good thing, followed by attacking the guy who let the word out, followed by high minded avowals to see to it that the perpetrators are properly exposed and punished, followed by frantic, and often silly, effort to prevent the loss of control from happening again. There are people who never get beyond the denial and rationalization stage (sound familiar?).
We are seeing the same pattern in the Iraqi prison disaster that we saw in the MiLei atrocity. All we are missing to this date is the attempt to turn the immediate perpetrator into a hero a’la Rusty Cally, and the white wash of the next command level a’la Captain Medina. It will happen. It will start with Ollie North and some sort of balderdash “support the troops” campaign, and our friend New Iskander will follow that parade with a scoop shovel.
A pointless hijack (but I started the thread so I can do that): I used to do work for a library in Columbus, GA. I ate quite often at a local Waffle House and I noticed that almost everytime I was in there I saw the same portly 50-60ish fellow who sat alone saying nothing and always, regardless of the weather carrying an umbrella. I assumed he was a harmless aging eccentric.
I later learned from one of the staff that the man is William Calley. He owns a pawn shop in the area and he carries the umbrella to open in the event of photographers or news crews who still occasionally try to interview him.
Backing up a few threads, buttmuffin is an odd endearment used by an old flamingly gay friend-of-a-friend of mine. I could never quite determine if it’s derogatory or not, so it must not be. (The interesting thing about the old man: he is the brother & business manager of an ultra-conservative former governor of Alabama and looks enough like him to be his twin, so hearing the words “that is one sweet lookin’ piece of boy p*ssy over theah” come from him was rather like hearing a Pat Robertson lookalike discuss the merits of Ricky Martin’s bon-bon.)
Because of the power of television, people forget that 60 Minutes 2 was NOT the only news organization to have the photos. The New Yorker magazine also had them. And those are just the two I know of.
So, there’s no point in arguing that if the photos hadn’t been shown on TV, they wouldn’t have gotten out.
And while I can’t argue my expertise in foreign policy, I have spent more than 20 years in public relations. I can tell you one cardinal rule: when you know bad news is coming, get out in front of it.
In this case, the Army asked, and CBS agreed, to sit on the story for two weeks. And what happened when the story finally ran?
We were treated to a host of official spokespersons who hadn’t seen the report and who wouldn’t comment on it because an investigation was ongoing. We were treated to the sight of the President of the United States being caught totally off-guard and (as of this afternoon) publicly acknowledging that he had reprimanded the Secretary of Defense.
If the Army, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, the White House - anyone - had taken that two weeks to brief everyone and prepare a response and gone on 60 Minutes to say the President was shocked, the Secretary of Defense was shocked and the Army had been conducting its own investigation for weeks (and all of this is apparently true) the entire command structure wouldn’t have been caught with its pants down, and this thread would never have been started.
This is taking at face value their shock and surprise at face value. Just like the Dick Clarke book, they had ample warning time that this would become a major issue, a big PR deal. So how seriously should we take their protestations? Remember, Myers, Rumsfeld, and Bush all claimed not to have even read the core report several days AFTER the story broke. Bush didn’t even seem to know that there had been an investigation. This begs the question of who really knew what, when, public statements aside.
I’m sorry but I think this is a rationalization used to protect and maintain the staus quo and those who produced it, and to allow them to escape the consequences of bad management.
I think our troops are no more endangered by the revelation of prisoner abuse than they were by the original decision to insert them into a preemtive war based on half-truths at best.
Actual endangerment of troops is well covered by existing laws such as prohibitions on revealing troop and ship movements in wartime. Adding either a self- or government-imposed censorship on such things as a complete loss of control, or alternatively winking at gross violations of military good order and discipline, on the part of command is destructive and not supportive of the national interest.
Hmmm: could this explain why the issue wasn’t taken more seriously in the Bush administration, at least until the story hit the media?
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002924
I’ve been wondering if all day if maybe Bush didn’t know months ago. Now he can claim he had no idea and Rumsfield knew and never told him! Isn’t that awful! Bush is an innocent victim in all of this. A man struggling to do the right thing, but being kept in the dark by his most trusted advisors. A man he thought he could trust. Isn’t that tragic? Don’t you feel sorry for him? So we’ll all understand if Rummy has to go away now and hopefully we can put all of this behind us and forget it ever happened. Who likes pie?
They couldn’t be tried at The Hague. The court isn’t competent since Irak isn’t a signatory of the treaty. Besides, even if it was competent, it would be only subsidiary to a trial in the USA (if they weren’t tried in the USA at all or if they had been tried but the court found it was a mock trial).
Such a thing could only happen if a special court for war crimes in Irak was insituted, similar to the courts for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia.
Note also that Bush’s supposed chastizing of Rumsfeld happened FIVE DAYS after the story broke, and after Bush and Rumsfeld had talked several other times. Heck, he went to a party at Rumsfeld’s house on April 30th, the day he and his PS had both commented on the photos.
Wow! I do hope you never get elected to a position of real power…
Some more developements:
Joshua Marshall also points out that if we want to blame military intelligence, then the only real figure in authority over that is Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.
Bippy was just doing some very cold-blooded realpolitik.
It’s what Bush & Co have been trying to do, but they just lack the competence, apparently.
-Joe
If this is indeed the same guy responsible for those prisoner abuses, you can kiss any chance of seeing him punished goodbye – can’t jepoardize that Christian Fundamenalist voting bloc, y’know.
To respond to the OP, in a free society, the news media is supposed to get the facts out. If something happened that the government doesn’t want anyone to know about and should be stopped, that’s ESPECIALLY the sorts of things they need to cover. To even question if 60 Minutes might have done something wrong is just another case of wanting to blame the messenger.