The digital age

Is it a new age in war reporting? Not that different perhaps, except maybe with the rapidity that information, whether it be text, photos, or video can be posted to the web from almost anywhere in the world. Paul Andrews published a piece in today's Seattle Times entitled "Digital Age reveals war's brutal details". In the column, Andrews discusses how the administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, failed to see how visual proof of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq would inflame world wide public sentiment far more than any written report. Rumsfeld is supposed to have said (and I paraphrase) that he had no idea how powerful the pictures could be. They seemed so much worse than the report he'd had since January. I sometimes wonder if this is just another example of the conceit continuously exhibited by members of the Bush Administration, or is it just that they're naive?

Now Seymour Hersh reports (in the New Yorker) that the intimidating and degrading treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror became policy after 9/11. Of course this is being denied, but I suspect that it will be shown that harsher interrogation methods became the norm, sanctioned all the way up the Defense and Justice lines of responsibility. The privates, specialists, and sargents all caught in the photos will take the brunt of it. They're in the pictures (how dumb was that?!), and soldiers,while required to follow orders justly, also have the responsibility to not carry out illegal orders. But they will argue that these methods of "softening up" of prisoners to make them more amenable to interrogation was acceptable practice.

One thing is obvioius. There needs to be accountability all the way up the chain of command, all the way to Rumsfeld. Yet the President and VP say that Rumsfeld is doing a great job. Rumsfeld flies to Iraq and tells troops at a rally that he doesn't read the newspapers anymore, insinuating that news organizations aren't presenting the truth, and gets a big cheer.

The conceit of power. Americans deserve more than that.

thoughts of color

This past week I spent three days in Washington DC to attend a NOAA workshop on OHH at our headquarters in Silver Spring MD. I ended up getting a room at a hotel located almost due south from the capital dome, but with Interstate 395 in between. I could see the dome from my room, albeit with several industrial type buildings and the freeway in the foreground. As usual, getting around was not difficult because of the Metro system (including from the airport), although after arriving I did get off at a train station that was much farther from the hotel than I thought, and it took me quite a bit longer trekking through some rather seedy looking territory to get there.

While the meeting went well, and I got a chance to sightsee a little on my last day, that's actually not the reason I'm writing this. The point is more that I was in a largely black part of DC and it was clear that the neighborhood was a little rough. The plexiglass shield protecting the wait staff at a Taco Bell and a local gas station attest to that. It did tend to make me feel a little more vulnerable than usual. This made me wonder. Did I feel this way because of any real physical danger? Probably not, at least no more so than some parts of downtown Seattle. Being a white liberal, I would like to think that I would have no feelings of discomfort around people of color. But I have to admit, getting on a crowded subway train when you're the only white person, does feel different. I think this is where many of us may begin to understand what racism and prejudice feels like. I don't mean to suggest that I experienced this in any overt way. But I certainly felt what it means to be a minority.

After a day of this, I really felt more relaxed. Of course I was still wary. Not because of color. It still was a rough neighborhood.