Would you like some fries with that generality, asshole?
Maybe I’m just extra-tired tonight, but to me, it all boils down to “No-one could agree with a statement that the media acted irresponsibly in reporting the Abu Ghraib case.”
I am cheered yet envious that some dopers have the ability to assess intelligence and moral character from a snapshot or geographic location.Perhaps continued avid reading will confer this ability,as meaningful employment in stasi organisations is virtually guaranteed.
Read the complete article Stern Article
… snipped
page 5
You apologized for it during your trial. You said that your actions probably led to the death of many GIs afterwards.
Yes. I received letters that accused me of being responsible for their deaths because the insurgents wanted to take revenge by attacking Americans. I can’t say for sure I killed thousands of people. I can say I killed all these people, but I didn’t kill them directly.
Thousands of Americans?
Both. I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it, … no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn’t exposed the pictures to that extent then thousands of lives would have been saved.
How can you blame the media? If you hadn’t committed the crimes in the first place, we would have no reason to report on it.
The government had the pictures in December but they didn’t come out till the end of April.
But you took the photos.
Yeah, I took the photos but I didn’t make it worldwide. Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures, and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government. And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did. But it would not have escalated to what it did all over the world if it wouldn’t have been for someone leaking it to the media. Hell, I was at Fort Bragg when the pictures came out and I had no idea.
Can you tell us about the day you heard the pictures had been made public?
The pictures came out on a Thursday, April 27 or 28. I called my Mom on Saturday. I was pregnant at the time, I didn’t have a car, I didn’t get the newspaper, I didn’t have a TV, I didn’t have a radio. I called my Mom from a payphone and she said, “There’s a hundred reporters out in the front yard. You’re all over the news, your face is in the papers, on CNN.” I just said, “What are you talking about?” I didn’t believe it. She started talking about the pictures and describing them. And I’m like, “Oh shit, how did they get out?”
Were you scared when you realized the pictures were out there?
I didn’t really believe it. It was kind of like I was still in shock. I was like “No, me?”
But you knew at that stage that the investigation had been underway since January?
Yeah, but I didn’t know it was so public with America, or even the world. So I went to this buddy I knew in the barracks, and I looked it up on the Internet and thought, “Oh my God.” I couldn’t believe it. And then I started getting paranoid. I was really getting scared at that point and thinking somebody’s gonna beat the shit out of me. And I was only three months pregnant and I wasn’t showing so they could beat the hell out of me and I could have lost the baby. I was pretty much alone, and I was scared. I couldn’t trust anybody. It was crazy.
Did you feel ashamed when you saw the pictures in public for the first time?
At the chow hall they had these two huge big-screen-TVs so you could watch while you were eating. I was sitting there eating and there was this big TV in front of me and they started showing the pictures of me, and everybody in the room turned and looked at me. So I left and went back to my room.
So you did feel shame?
I was scared, I thought “Man, I’m gonna get the shit kicked out of me.”
Any shame, any guilt?
Yeah, I thought, “These people are gonna think I’m horrible and, you know, I am horrible for doing this and getting into that.” But somewhere in my mind I was thinking, you know they don’t really understand the whole story.
The former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called you and your colleagues the “rotten apples” of the military. Bush claimed to be ashamed of what you did.
Well, back then I thought: How can they say that when it was happening all over Iraq. The same thing is happening in Guantanamo now and other places. We knew that our officers knew about it and our sergeants. We thought if they know then somebody else knows. And I really do still think that Rumsfeld knew what was going on. I mean he had been there while I was there at that prison. And if he was there I know he knew what was going on. How could he have not known? And Bush? He’s the headman.
Do you feel more like a victim or an offender?
I feel more like a puppet. First I was played by Graner. Then the media portrayed me as their puppet so they could flash my picture out over and over and over and over again. And then I became the government’s puppet because they didn’t back me up, or remotely take my side. They just agreed with what the media said.
Saying you were a puppet again makes you sound like a victim.
Okay, I do take responsibility. I was dumb enough to do all that. And to think that it was okay because of the other officers and the orders that were coming down. But when you’re in the military you automatically do what they say. It’s always, “Yes Sir, No Sir.” You don’t question it. And now they’re saying, “Well, you should have questioned it.”
There is talk about new pictures that are even harsher than the ones we know.
I know there were some harsher pictures they had at the time of the trial that the media decided not to expose.
What was on those pictures?
You see the dogs biting the prisoners. Or you see bite marks from the dogs. You can see MPs holding down a prisoner so a medic can give him a shot. If those had been made public at the time, then the whole world would have looked at those and not at mine.
Was Abu Ghraib the turning point of the war?
I actually thought about that before the pictures came out. I thought, “I hope this never comes out because it’ll change the way people see the war. And the way people see America.” And it did, it changed everything. I felt bad about that. I felt sorry. And I still do.
Did you think three years was the correct punishment for your crime?
No. It’s ridiculous. It was much too long. If you look at my charge sheet, I was only charged and convicted for posing in pictures. Not for physically abusing prisoners.
… snipped
Now my take on this is she is pissed because those pictures had been in the government’s hands for quite some time, and the ones that had been released pretty much singled her out. She has apologized for her part in it, she is sorry, and she will pay for this the rest of her life.
I have long felt the media was culpable when reporting freak crimes (therefore giving creepizoids ideas) or when they knew (as any intelligent person would) that their reportage would likely result in further death.
For example, I can recall an occasion years ago when a sleeping bum was doused with gasoline and set on fire. It received wide nationwide reportage and sure enough, within a week or two four or five more around the country were set on fire in copycat crimes. Same with dropping large rocks through windshields from an overpass.
The press’ argument is the public’s need to know, which I think to a large degree is just a specious excuse to mask the real goal which is readership/viewership.
On the other hand, I can see a legitimate need of reportage in order to warn people in incidents like the highway snipings going on a few years ago, and something as major as Columbine would pretty much have to be reported.
But discretion on the part of the press in certain cases would undoubtedly result in fewer deaths and they don’t care one bit. In publishing the Abu Graib photos, the media - in an attempt to either stir people up further against the war by making us look like the bad guys, or in a good faith effort to stop the mistreatment that truly was occurring there - traded the loss of at the least hundreds of American lives in order to achieve whatever it was they wanted to accomplish (and again, I believe what they were primarily interested in was viewership).
In many ways I find the media’s behavior reprehensible but an unfettered media is a necessary evil in a democracy. It’s too bad the media doesn’t have it within itself to take the high road in cases such as these rather than to willingly sacrifice human lives in order to publicize a much less harmful wrong or in their pursuit of an audience.
Keep in mind this wasn’t some random street crime. These were crimes being carried out by the United States government. Exposing government malfeasance isn’t a side-effect of freedom of the press; it’s the reason that freedom of the press was created. The publication that printed those pictures were doing exactly what the authors of the Constitution intended - they were keeping an eye on the government and exposing something the government was doing wrong.
Thank you, you said this better than I could. I agree that the publication of the pics was absolutely the right thing. And I would also say that the American soldiers who abused and tortured prisoners were far more responsible for the violence that followed the revelations than was the media.
I disagree. The crimes were carried out by certain renegade people within the the government and not the government itself.
Recently an American serviceman was arrested on charges of raping a young girl in Japan. Would you say she was raped by the United States government?
There are literally thousands of significant things about the government that the media could be reporting on in order to fulfill their fourth estate responsibilities, but they don’t because they don’t particularly care (i.e., there’s no payoff in ratings) and because they don’t serve to cast the war in a negative light.
The media’s true concern with living up to its noblesse oblige with regard to the constitution is about the third or fourth rung down on the ladder of its motivations.
I agree with you both 100%. I just think that the face of torture and Abu Ghraib shouldn’t be a female private that posed with naked men. I think it should be the men that beat and raped and killed boys and men. I may be wrong, but on the torture scale what L. England did was shitty, but not even close to the real brutality. The media stuck with the pictures, not the story.
No, I disagree. There has been abundant evidence that abuse, torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners was deliberate policy approved at very high levels of the American military and civilian government.
Um, pardon me, but would you be so kind as to explain what the holy fuck makes American lives so fucking sacred?
And while you’re at it, perhaps you can explain why the reporting should be blamed for the loss of those oh-so-sacred American lives, rather than the abuse of power by those [stupid, foolish, and unfortunate] kids?
Reasonable men of good will can disagree on many things in regard to this question. What constitutes torture…and what may or may not be the reason for employing it, orhow far up the ladder of officiality said torture or abuse can be shown to go…are questions that have been debated ad infinitum around here and I don’t want to get into them here.
Besides, even if you are correct wrong-doing is possible by individuals at almost any level of the government, and it is certainly possible for certain types of malfeasance to find their way fairly high up a particular chain of command and still have them fall short of official or even unofficial U.S. policy.
But for now, let me just say that I’ve not been convinced that the images shown in the Lynndie England photos were the result of direct high-level U.S. government orders or official policy.
I will also state that I believe the harm done by the publication of those photographs was much greater, on a practical level and in terms of lost life, than whatever harm was done by the things the photographs portrayed.
How many times have the middle-eastern press been held to task for publishing the twelve Danish cartoons and deliberately whipping their populace into a frenzy in order to serve their own ends?
I see very little difference here.
The question of subsequent American deaths were part of England’s questioning. Just upthread on this page can be found the following:
*You apologized for it during your trial. You said that your actions probably led to the death of many GIs afterwards.
Yes. I received letters that accused me of being responsible for their deaths because the insurgents wanted to take revenge by attacking Americans. I can’t say for sure I killed thousands of people. I can say I killed all these people, but I didn’t kill them directly.
page 6
**Thousands of Americans?*Both. I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it, … no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn’t exposed the pictures to that extent then thousands of lives would have been saved.
It was this line of questioning and England’s response to it that I had in mind when composing my post.
Perhaps if you can calm down enough you will go back and actually read what I said and you will discover that I’ve already explained it.
I am not taking issue with England’s response, but your own words; you specified American lives, implying that such are particularly to be cherished. I can not understand that attitude, I want you to explain it to me.
Where? I can not find the post where you explain why “why the reporting should be blamed … rather than the abuse of power”.
Not to be snarky, if the abuse had not been perpetrated, there would have been nothing to report. (Well, yeah, I am being snarky.)
[‘Calm down’? No-one old enough to vote … hell, to drive, still falls for that non-response.]
The US government has been quite open in it’s use of torture. I’m not going to list a bunch, but here is some cites just to shut you up before you can even tell me that the USA doesn’t use torture.
Human Rights Watch
United Nations
Forbes.com
I could go on and on, but I’m sure you get the picture. The United States DOES practice torture and DOES have secret prisons, scary isn’t it?
If he did it while on duty, and she was in US custody, AND he had implied approval of his superiors, then yes. If not, then you are just being silly.
I question how much knowledge of what was happening in Abu Ghraib reached the people in Iraq via mainstream American media, and how much of it reached them via from the prisoners themselves, or those who worked in the prison. They’re living right there with that thing. They don’t need CNN to show them pictures of prisoners being savaged by dogs, when Sayid next door can show them his bite marks.
Starving Artist, would you agree the press acted properly if it could be proved that the American government had approved the use of indiscriminate torture on civilian prisoners? Just speaking hypothetically, without addressing the question of wether that’s what really happened: if we had a memo signed by Bush himself that said, “Torture the hell out of those damned ragheads,” would the press be derelict for publishing that?
As I just said, I specified American lives for no other reason than that they were what Lynndie England was being questioned about and what she was responding to. Had I known that for some reason someone was going to get into a snit about it, I’d have also mentioned Iraqis fighting on our side.
One would think that such would go without saying, but apparently not. One of the reasons I was strongly in support of toppling Hussein was his mistreatment of Iraqi citizens, and if we had a search function I’d suggest you search the many posts I made at that time in which I said so.
This is silly. I clearly explained above my feelings in regard to press culpability in the potentially deadly consequences of its coverage, and why I felt that in this regard that those deadly consequences far outweighed whatever good was accomplished by publication of the photos. If you didn’t understand it then, you aren’t likely to understand it if I repeat it now either.
There’s such a thing as proportionality, you know. For example, we don’t put people in prison for jaywalking. The fact that abuse occurred does not justify, IMO, reportage that anyone with half a brain would know will lead to ramped up fighting and many, many needless deaths that would not have occurred otherwise.
You seem to be asking two different questions here. First, whether the press acted properly if it could be proved the government approved the actions depicted. In that case, I’d say no…and for the same reasons I described above. The proper course of action would be to bring the evidence to the attention of the appropriate military and/or congressional authorities and have the government’s actions dealt with as a matter of law. This is why we have congressional committees plus military and civilian courts of law.
Second, do I think it would be appropriate for the media to report the hypothetical case of Bush issuing a memo stating “Torture the hell out of those damned ragheads,” or course I’d not only support that but I’d encourage it. However, the reporting of such a memo by Bush or anyone else is not what we’re talking about here, and I doubt very much that such a disclosure would lead to riots, fighting and deaths such as followed publication of the Lynndie England photos.
You could have shut me up even more by not implying that I would say such a thing in the first place, as I don’t believe I’ve ever weighed in on the subject one way or the other. So you see, if only you’d done that even this modest disclaimer would have been unnecessary.
Snit? Sorry, sugar, that’s no more convincing than ‘calm down’. I am not in a snit; I am quite reasonably calling you out a using hot-button terminology instead of facts. The argument that you are just repeating England is no explanation. YOU used the term, you justify or withdraw it.
Color me confused SA, but I thought thats what we were talking about here… what “crimes” did these “renegades” commit then?
You are most amusing, honeybun’.
In the first place, I’m not repeating England; I’m basing my comments on questions that she was asked, and, secondarily, upon some of what she answered. Second, it’s interesting that you regard the mere mention of the loss of American lives (gasp!) to be “hot-button” terminology. And third, I think I’ll decide for myself what to justify or withdraw, thank you very much.
I can see it was a mistake to try to answer you in good faith. I won’t make that mistake again soon.
FarmerChick, there’s nothing to be confused about; I said that in my opinion the abuses at Abu Graib in the Lynndie England photos were the result of ‘renegade’ military people behaving badly on their own.
As to how far up the chain of command this type of behavior was known of or condoned, I have no idea, but I’ve heard and read nothing substantive that would indicate that the behavior there was the result of following orders from on high as part of official U.S. policy.
The U.S. government and military have been quite clear in their condemnation of the events those photographs depict.
You then came charging in on high so as to “shut me up” before I could tell you the U.S. doesn’t torture. This presumption of yours is erroneous in a couple of ways. First, you seem to be conflating renegade abuse with official government policy, and secondly, you seem to be of the opinion that I was about to tell you the U.S. doesn’t torture, when I’ve never made such a proclamation anywhere on this board. The question of torture, what qualifies as torture, which types of situations may or may not call for it, etc. are too complex, multi-faceted and situation-specific for me to feel qualified to comment on.
So, before I leave the thread I will simply point out that my comments here have been intended to address the issue of whether or not there was media malfeasance in publishing the Lynndie England photos. You and j666 are trying to drag me into an argument over entirely different issues and I’m not gonna go there.