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Topic: 2020 vision despite being blinded by war (Read 619 times) |
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Hermit
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2020 vision despite being blinded by war
« on: 2009-09-08 03:15:33 » |
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Killing America’s Kids
[ Hermit : Impressive writing. Well worth the time it takes to read. ]
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Fred Reed
Dated: 2009-09-08
The Web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a lance corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the Web:
"Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard’s family is feeling right now, and that Curley’s ‘lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy, or constitutional right – but judgment and common decency.’"
I thought a long time before writing about this matter and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless secretary, I too was a Marine lance corporal of 21 years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) 13th trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.
Big f*cking deal. Sh*t happens. At this point I’m comfortable and doing fine. Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The other kid is dead.
But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the U.S.
But Gates. The words "decency" and "unconscionable" coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. "Intelligence" agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, Stasi, SAVAK – they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.
Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?
It could almost make you turn against the war. Some 6,000 American kids have died like this, the photographs carefully hidden by the press. The Pentagon has killed many, many more Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and the number of permanently disabled Americans is far higher. Today I find a column on Antiwar.com by Joe Galloway, whom I remember from UPI Saigon, entitled "Afghanistan Isn’t Worth One More American Life." I agree. Nor another Afghan life. They did nothing. Another headline notes that the Kondor Legion, the USAF, killed 95 Afghans in another witless air strike. These days, we are the Nazis.
Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping, acquiescent, ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing military from Vietnam – they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as before – but they learned something more important: their most dangerous enemy is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the American public can.
Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling, somnolent, inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.
In wars, there are many enlightening things to see. For example, the Marine with a third of his face and half a lung, going ku-kuk-kuk as red gunk rolls out of his mouth and he drowns in his blood. Ruined or dying teenagers whimpering the trinity of the badly wounded: mother, wife, and water. The brain-shot guy jerking like an epileptic as he tries not to die. Ever see brain tissue from gunshot? I have. It makes a pink spew across the ground. Like strawberry chiffon.
Gates does not want you to see this. You would puke, buy a bottle of bourbon, and take to the streets. He knows it. CBS could end these wars in a week if it aired what really happens. Gates cannot afford to let the dam break. PR is all. Thus Bush forbade the photographing of coffins coming home, and the CIA ferociously resists the publication of photographs of torture. Professional sadists do things to people that would make you gag.
Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking. In some three decades of covering the military, I saw this constantly. If I went to Afghanistan today as a correspondent, I could argue in private about the war with the colonel. If I suggested to the troops that they were being suckered, the colonel would go crazy. Next to keeping the public quiescent, keeping the troops (and potential recruits) bamboozled is vital. If a high-school kid saw what awaited, if he saw the cartilage glistening in wrecked joints, he wouldn’t sign.
Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still… slowly… moving, the dead children, the… never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.
Julie Jacobson sounds like that modern-day rarity, a reporter, as distinguished from a volunteer flack. Bless her. I used to wonder whether women could hack it as combat correspondents. I no longer do. (There are lots of them.) I used to refer to smarmy, over-groomed, bloodthirsty office warts as p*ssies, saying that they lacked balls. The anatomical reference no longer works. I note that Jacobson has more combat time than the aggregate for Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Obama, Biden, Gonzales, Clinton, Perle, Abrams, Kristol, Feith, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, George Will, Dershowitz, and Gates. These men, if the word is appropriate, killed that kid. Jacobson just caught them in the act.
The messy demise of Joshua Bernard at 21. Photo Credit: Julie Jacobson
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:2020 vision despite being blinded by war
« Reply #1 on: 2009-09-08 11:31:02 » |
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[Blunderov] Not so much a stunning retort as a comprehensive demolition of that moral pygmy Gates. We didn't notice Gates whining about the 24/7 CNN loop of the falling buildings and bodies of 9/11; apparently his aesthetic sensibilities do not extend quite that far. What an unmitigated arsehole!
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Hermit
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Re:2020 vision despite being blinded by war
« Reply #2 on: 2009-10-16 13:04:23 » |
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Photos of Military Deaths in Afghanistan Banned
[ Hermit : In order for a democracy to function, an educated informed plebiscate is a prerequisite. Once again, America proves that under Democrats, as under Republicans, the suppression of information the elite regard as bad news is vastly more important than any amount of lipservice to "democracy" in this kleptocratic Republic run by the elites for the benefit of the elites. Thus, not entirely unexpectedly, Obama's government once again proves that its commitment to "transparency" is no greater, and in some cases rather less, than that of the Bush maladministration. ]
Source: Nielsen Business Media
Authors: Daryl Lang (Photo District News)
Dated: 2009-10-15
The U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan recently changed its media embed rules to ban pictures of troops killed in the war.
“Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action,” says a ground rules document issued Sept. 15 by Regional Command East at Bagram Air Field.
This language is new. A version of the same document dated July 23 says, “Media will not be prohibited from covering casualties” as long as a series of conditions are met.
Pictures of American military deaths are rare, but until now they have not been officially banned during either of the ongoing wars.
The new language was added in early September, according to a military spokesperson, Master Sgt. Tom Clementson of Regional Command East Public Affairs. Clementson described it as “a clarification rather than a new rule.”
“The clarification was added to ensure that service members’ privacy and propriety are maintained in situations where media have unique and intimate access as embedded reporters,” Clementson wrote by e-mail in response to questions. “While RC East does everything possible to accommodate an embedded reporters’ ability to cover the war in this region, there is also a command responsibility to account for the best interests of its service members.”
The change occurred after the wide distribution of a photograph of a dying U.S. Marine. On Sept. 4, the Associated Press released a photo of a mortally wounded Marine in Afghanistan.
The image, which was shot August 14 by AP photographer Julie Jacobson, was released as part of a package of stories and photos about the death of Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard. Both U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Bernard’s family had asked the AP not to release the photo. Few newspapers published the image, but it was widely circulated online. (The photograph can be viewed here.) [ Hermit : Link was broken but the picture is above ]
Based on a review of other embed agreements, the ban issued in early September appears to be unique to the U.S. operation in eastern Afghanistan.
The NATO-controlled International Security Assistance Force, which handles embeds elsewhere in Afghanistan, allows press photos of casualties as long as some conditions are met. For example, photos that identify a dead service member cannot be released before the service member’s next of kin have been notified of the death.
(The AP’s photo of Lance Cpl. Bernard was taken in Helmand province, which is outside of Regional Command East.)
For Multi National Force-Iraq embeds, a ground rules document dated Aug. 14 contains restrictions on casualty images, but does not ban photos of killed-in-action casualties.
The new Regional Command East rule drew little notice before Friday, when it was reported by the blog of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It has since appeared on other blogs, including one from PDN sibling publication Editor & Publisher.
The AP is aware of the change. “We have queried the Pentagon about the photo rules and have been told that the matter is being reviewed,” AP spokesperson Paul Colford said this week.
Under the Obama administration, the Pentagon took one step toward making war casualties more visible to the press. In April, it began allowing photographers to cover the returns of remains at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware when next of kin
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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