One of Ours

In World War II a passerby, lost in London's Whitehall, stopped a US military officer and asked him which side the Defense Department was on. The officer thought for a moment and then said:

''Well, it's hard to be sure, but our side, I hope.''...

In the last week the coverage of Iraq by the U.S. media has exhibited at least four separate failings:

1. Inferentialism. Several media reports of the Abu Ghraib scandal have been, in effect, prosecuting briefs for the theory that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld either knew about or authorized the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. Since the evidence for this is scanty, reporters build inference upon speculation to make the case...


...suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive" techniques...could have been an outgrowth...although no direct links have been found...The coincidence in timing..."

[...]

In opposition to this towering inferno of inferences, there is an actual fact: The statement of one of the abuser guards that the higher-ups would have stopped the abuses if they had known of them.

2. Selective agonizing. Ever since the Abu Ghraib photos emerged, the media have shown them on every possible occasion, along with reports and editorials on America's shame and the world's revulsion.

The photographs are shocking evidence of shocking behavior and we should be ashamed they occurred under American auspices. But they are not the only story in the world. Objectively considered, the UN's "Oil for Food" scandal is a far bigger story, involving the starvation of children. Interestingly, the media have been happy to forget it entirely in all their excitement over Abu Ghraib.

Then again, worse rape and brutality than that displayed in Abu Ghraib are known to occur daily in America's prisons without arousing any media interest at all.

And the photographs of prisoner abuse are not remotely as shocking as the pictures of Nicholas Berg being beheaded by Islamist terrorists. You might imagine that the beheading of an innocent American would be replayed endlessly.

3. Taking dictation from terror. Before we leave Berg, we should note that a vast number of news outlets reported that he was murdered "in retaliation for" the Abu Ghraib abuses. That was the terrorists' own justification...The "retaliation" explanation transferred the blame for Berg's death from the actual murderers onto George W. Bush and the United States....the terrorists abducted Berg about two weeks before the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced. Was that abduction in retaliation for something else?

4. Willing gullibility. Two newspapers -- the Daily Mirror in Britain and the Boston Globe -- have published fake photographs of British and American soldiers abusing prisoners. In the British case the fakes were quickly detected once they had been published, and in the U.S. case, they had been detected before the Globe published them.

Neither the media's vaunted "skepticism" nor simple fact-checking on the Internet were employed by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, "too good to check." ...the journalists wanted to believe they were real. Indeed, it is worse than that -- since the fraud was discovered and the Mirror editor fired, he has become a heroic figure in British circles hostile to Blair and the war.

Admittedly, reporters and editors make mistakes. But when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the United States or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something.

Namely, which side they're on.