Rumsfeld on 'kill team' photos: 'Much worse' than Abu Ghraib

YF, if you're trying to angle this thread toward a debate over liberal media bias, please stop now.

This is an important story that is very worthy of discussion, but not in the form of a left/right political pissing match.

 

That's the best point so far. I believe that Rumsfeld said he didn't see the Abu Ghraib pictures until they were in the media.

Give me a break. If it's so worthy of discussion, then why hasn't it been discussed here yet -- or barely anywhere else.

Abu Ghraib was used as a political club to bash Bush, Rumsfeld, and the U.S. Military at large.

I haven't bashed Obama. I haven't bashed the media or accused anyone of bias.

But, I would like to know why a story like this receives scant attention. And, wr fatigue, or whatever you want to call it is nonsense.

Because prior instances of things like this were trumpeted as such grave mistakes that undermined all of our good work. It was things like this that helped to create terrorists. Is that no longer the case? Is something different? Am I missing something?

 

Wasn't it the cover-up in Abu Ghraib, not the crime, that caused so much attention? Same thing with Lt. Calley back in the day.

I read this story this week and definitely wanted to know more. I was surprised it hadn't entered my orbit until then, as it was so heinous.

I think there were lots of war crime/court martial stories during the Bush administration that didn't get the attention of Abu Gharib, either. Lots of factors go into why a particular story gets legs and another does not.

 

Perhaps because the Rolling Stone article was only published a couple days ago?

And you're foolish if you don't think the "fatigue" factor impacts coverage. Abu Ghraib shocked the hell out of naive flag-waiving 2004 America, it was something new. But hardly anything over there shocks 2011 America after seven more years of stories about Guantanamo, torture, waterboarding, rendition, the military's sordid lies and cover ups regarding things like Pat Tillman's death and Jessica Lynch's phony heroics, youtube videos of soldiers killing puppies and taunting locals, wikileaks videos of innocents getting gunned down, etc.

Our innocence is long gone when it comes to our Mideast wars, and a large percentage of the formerly-interested no longer want to know what's going on over there. And the media adjusts supply to consumer demand just like any other business.

 

YF, I don't think that the work-a-day media is nearly as agenda-driven as you think it is. Rolling Stone and the Huffington Post? Yeah, maybe. But papers like the NYT and the Washington Post just want to break big stories. The reporters on the ground, by and large, are not the idealogues that you might think.

 

Morlock's sentencing was everywhere a week ago.

http://news.google.com/news/more?q=morlock&hl=en&prmd=ivnsu&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dJ6SmP2OLGYr7mM5IWwItgrF02bwM&ei=U4KTTYDjL6rg0gG1t-TMBw&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=2&ved=0CDMQqgIwAQ

 

You can't tell me that the mainstream media is carrying liberal water these days when I had to watch Matt Lauer this morning interview Michelle shit-for-brains Bachmann, with a straight face, about her views on our policy and action in Libya.

 

You wanna say it, YF? Then just say it. But stop coming here and asking us to say it for you. It's a tired, stupid act.

 

What passive/aggressive BS.

 

YF -- in the immediate aftermath of Abu Ghraib and continuing to this day, there has been a debate about whether anything there was torture or was wrong in amy way. The pro-administration officials and media outlets took a notable "what's the big deal?" attitude that propelled the entire situation as a matter of being discussion worthy. Here we have some rogue soldiers who are universally viewed as contemptible. There is no "other side" of that discussion.

 

Which media outlet?

 

The coverage of Abu Ghraib didn't ramp up for several months. It took 60 Minutes II showing the photos to get most media outlets to pay attention to it.

http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=3716