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.