SwiftVets.com

[Craig]

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/May/05132004/commenta/165995.asp

Rumsfeld's real problem with photographs not clicking


Clarence Page
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

WASHINGTON -- If I had my way, every enlisted man and woman in the military would be issued a digital camera.
As we've seen in the scandal about abused Iraqi prisoners, the little gadgets help boost morale by providing snapshots that can be e-mailed back home. They also can come in handy when you need to gather evidence.
I like those little cameras because certain power elites don't.
Take, for example, the contempt that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld showed for digital cameras during recent hearings on Capitol Hill.
His response to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, turned into a bit of a rant of frustration: "We're functioning -- with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
No, folks, it's apparently not the administration's gross lack of preparation for the management of post-Saddam Iraq that's the problem, in Rummy's view. It's those pesky soldiers and their Weapons of Mass Photography.
Yet, something rings a little hollow about Rumsfeld's complaint. While he gripes that the prisoner abuse photos arrived in the hands of the media before they reached the Pentagon, the Pentagon sat on the prisoner abuse report without telling Congress or President Bush for two months before the photos were released.
In late April, Rumsfeld told Congress how the war was going without mentioning Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's damning report on abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison -- even though the report had been sitting in the Pentagon since February.
Advertisement

Rumsfeld and other Pentagon brass also had been hearing complaints for more than a year from the International Red Cross and other human rights groups about atrocious abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers.
But these matters apparently didn't register much with the top Pentagon brass until the night after Rumsfeld's April visit to Capitol Hill. That was the night CBS' "60 Minutes II" broadcast explosive photos of naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib being poked, prodded, wired, bagged, paraded around, stacked up and otherwise humiliated by their male and female American guards.
When CBS informed the Pentagon of the photos, the reaction of Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quick and immediate: He asked them to withhold the pictures, claiming their release might put U.S. soldiers in harm's way.
Yet, one wonders, if the Big Brassos' only concern was for the safety of U.S. soldiers, why did neither Myers nor Rumsfeld bother to tell Congress or the president about the photos? If the commander in chief is a national security risk, the rest of us would like to know.
We've come to expect phobic paranoia about pictures from this administration. At the beginning of the Iraq war it strengthened a ban on photos of coffins of war dead returning to Dover Air Force Base, Del., a policy that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney imposed in 1991 during the first Iraq war. The reason given is privacy, which strains believability, since photos do not reveal who is in the coffins.
Interesting, the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign showed none of that squeamishness about privacy when it included the 9-11 image of a New York City firefighter's coffin in a campaign ad.
Apparently the issue is not the photos but who has control of them. Fortunately, in this Internet age, it's not so easy to keep secrets from the American people, whether it's Bill Clinton's Oval Office peccadilloes or the far-more serious questions of our military's conduct overseas.
Those with long memories may recall writer Seymour Hersh's first big scoop, the 1968 massacre of unarmed Vietnamese villagers, including women and children, at My Lai. The incident didn't get much ink when he reported it in late 1969, until the Cleveland Plain Dealer printed photos taken by ex-Army photographer Ron Haeberle, a Cleveland resident. Pictures do have power.
Rummy's real problem isn't photos, it's democracy. If the public were less eager to know so much stuff, life would be a lot easier for our military leaders. Unfortunately, life soon would become a lot harder on the rest of us.
That's why I don't expect to get my wish. Instead of issuing cameras, the military, backed by the Bush administration, more likely will impose more restrictions on pictures. The first impulse of government is to put a lid on information about itself, even when the public has a right to know.
Sure, democracy can be messy and even confusing sometimes. But it's the best system we've got.
-----
Tribune Media Services