Image War
Iraq horrors grow more complex
Cathy Young
http://www.reason.com/cy/cy051804.shtml

There are times when, no matter what else may be in the news, one can only write about one story. This week, it's the murder of Nicholas Berg, the young American businessman kidnapped in Iraq and decapitated by his Al Qaeda captors, a video of his final moments put up on the Internet by his killers as a trophy. Or maybe it's the wrong story to write about, because when confronted with such horror, words fail.

Stories of Western hostages in Iraq have a personal dimension for me. A friend of mine, a special education teacher, is currently in Iraq helping to set up the country's first-ever educational program for children with mental disabilities. She is in the Kurdish part of Northern Iraq, where things are supposed to be reasonably safe; but who knows how safe that is? About 12 hours after the news of Nicholas Berg's murder, I chatted with my friend online. Neither of us mentioned the murder. I wasn't sure whether she knew about it. I wasn't sure I wanted to find out.

What, then, is there to say? There is the obvious point—the first thing that came to my mind, and no doubt to many others', once the initial shock had worn off—that the terrorists are not only evil but stupid. The day before Al Qaeda's new snuff film hit the airwaves, the world's attention was on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandals. The images on everyone's mind were those of US soldiers sadistically mistreating Iraqi detainees. The Americans were looking like the bad guys. At home, staunch supporters of the war in Iraq were wavering.

And then, as Howard Kurtz memorably put it in The Washington Post, "the murderers changed the subject."

One easy—too easy—response to the murder of Nicholas Berg is to say that there's been too much hand-wringing over the prison abuse scandal: At least no one in Abu Ghraib had his head slowly hacked off with a machete and held up before a camera. And besides, some are saying, Look what we're up against: When we're fighting the kind of animals who would do that, we can't be too squeamish about the means.

Such a reaction is an understandable first response born of shock and rage. But it should not be a guide to policy.

The people who murdered Berg are monsters (just like the people who murdered Daniel Pearl two years ago). But they are not the same people who were being brutalized in Abu Ghraib. Some of those prisoners may have been terrorists; some may have been small-time troublemakers; some may have been innocent of any wrongdoing and jailed by mistake. To equate them all with the Al Qaeda butchers makes no more sense than to equate all Americans in Iraq with the Abu Ghraib abusers.

And yes, it's quite true that the humiliation, mistreatment, and in some cases outright torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib did not sink to the level of hacking off heads. That's a reason to pat ourselves on the back? If you find out that a close relative of yours is a rapist, the fact that he's not Jack the Ripper is not exactly cause to feel much better.

There's another angle to this story: the issue of media coverage. Some prowar commentators such as the New Republic's Andrew Sullivan argue that the media that publicized the Abu Ghraib abuse photos are guilty of a double standard if they don't give equal exposure to stills from the Nicholas Berg murder video. Again, the impulse is understandable. But do we want to push the envelope further and further by airing more extreme images of violence? So far, the worst of the abuse photos are not being released either.

Others, such as National Review's Jonah Goldberg, are saying that the prison abuse photos should have been suppressed because airing them inflamed passions in the Muslim world and probably got Berg killed. But even if the link between Berg's murder and the Abu Ghraib scandal is real, it does not follow that nixing the photos would have saved lives. In the modern world, images cannot be suppressed for very long. If the American media had run the abuse story but refused to carry the pictures, how long would it be before those photos found their way to Al Jazeera—or Al Qaeda? Moreover, such a scenario would take away one claim Americans can proudly make right now: that we are open about our mistakes.

Cathy Young is a Reason contributing editor. This column appeared in the Boston Globe on May 17, 2004.

Left Eye’s View
Seeing through the Abu Ghraib coverage.
John O'Sullivan
http://www.nationalreview.com/jos/jos200405181427.asp

In World War II, a passer-by, lost in London's main official thoroughfare of Whitehall, stopped a 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. Selective Agonizing. Ever since the Abu Ghraib photographs emerged, the media has shown them on every possible occasion, accompanied by reports and editorials on America's shame and the world's revulsion. That is fine by me. The photographs are shocking evidence of shocking behavior — Jerry Springer meets Saddam Hussein — and we should be ashamed they occurred under American auspices But they are not the only story in the world.

Objectively considered, the U.N.'s "Oil-for-Food" scandal is a far bigger story, implicating not one international statesman but about two dozen, and involving not the abuse of suspected terrorists but the starvation of children. Interestingly, the media has been happy to forget it entirely in all their excitement over Abu Ghraib.

Then again, worse rape and brutality than those displayed in Abu Ghraib are known to occur daily in America's prisons without arousing any media interest at all. Indeed, the newspapers sometimes join D.A.'s in calling for crooked CEO's to be sentenced to ten year's hard sodomy. Maybe these jocular remarks about homosexual rape were among the influences that led the Abu Ghraib guards to abuse their victims. Big mistake. This gloating sadism is only a joke when suspected Republicans are the likely victims.


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 on the networks and the front pages. But the media suddenly discovered taste. The Berg murder was briskly reported and then confined to the memory hole. And the media hunt for Rumsfeld — that Berg's beheading had briefly interrupted — resumed in full cry.

As a Spanish writer commented this week: "Tears are shed only from the left eye."

2. Taking Dictation from Terror. Before we leave Berg, we should note that a vast number of news outlets reported as a fact that he was murdered "in retaliation for" the Abu Ghraib abuses. That was the terrorists' own justification, of course: They shrewdly judged that the American and Western media would eagerly publish the headlines they had dictated. And they were right. For the "retaliation" explanation transfers the blame for Berg's death from the actual murderers onto George W. Bush and the U.S. As the sharp-eyed Australian blogger, Tim Blair, pointed out, however, the terrorists abducted Berg about two weeks before the Abu Ghraib scandal surfaced. Was that abduction in retaliation for something else? Or were they simply gifted with astonishing foresight? Incidentally, the media's behavior in this case — in addition to being bone-headedly biased — is a rare genuine example of "blaming the victim." But not a single editor seems to have been restrained by the fact.

3. Willing Gullibility. Two newspapers — the Daily Mirror in Britain and the Boston Globe in the U.S. — 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 American 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 in either case by the papers. The fakes were, in the old Fleet Street joke, "too good to check." There was a rush to misjudgment. As Mark Steyn argued in the Chicago Sun-Times on Sunday, the journalists wanted to believe that they were real because they hunger to discredit the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq.

Indeed, they still want to believe that the fakes were real — the disgraced Mirror editor claimed to have told the truth on the day the fraud was conclusively established. And since he was fired, he has become a heroic figure in British journalistic circles hostile to Blair and the war. He may be a liar, they feel, but he's our liar. Or as they would probably put it, the "truth about Iraq" is more important than the facts. You know, at a deeper level.

4. Galloping Inferentialism. The media's main interest in the Abu Ghraib scandal over the last week — what postmodernists call its principal "narrative" — has been its pursuit of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as an accessory to torture before the fact. Some reports have been, in effect, prosecution briefs for the theory that he either knew about or (better still) actually authorized the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American guards. And since the evidence for this theory is scanty, to say the least, reporters employ the highly dubious technique of building inference upon inference to make the case.

Take, as an example, the widely republished Washington Post report asking "Was Abuse Ordered?" This begins with the case of a Syrian jihadist who was subjected to intense pressures to instill fear into him so that he would give up intelligence data for the fight against the Iraqi insurgents. It then speculates that because a military intelligence officer was involved in this interrogation, this "suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive" techniques by senior officers. It goes on to argue that the Abu Ghraib "abuses could have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment" techniques authorized by the Pentagon. And it finally postulates that "although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials...say that the hunt for [intelligence] data...was coordinated during this period by Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone...long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The coincidence in timing...."

Let us review the evidence in this trial by inference. It "suggests" that "potentially" abusive techniques were used that "could have been an outgrowth" of methods that cannot be "directly linked" to Rumsfeld unless the "coincidence" that his aide was in charge of collecting intelligence at the time is the smoking gun.

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. And as the old maxim goes, an ounce of fact is worth a ton of inferences.

5. Hunting the Snark (or Criminalizing Antiterrorism.) What makes this journalistic pursuit of Rumsfeld all the more suspect is that even if all these inferences were borne out by later evidence, they would not convict the Defense secretary of any known crime or misdemeanor. He would have authorized harsh techniques, not in themselves abusive but only potentially so, that others wrongly took to be permission to humiliate and abuse prisoners under their control. There is no crime in that — nor even any major error. Senior Pentagon officials knew that the harsh interrogation techniques they did authorize — for instance, hooding prisoners, interrupting their sleep over several days, and exposing them to cold temperatures — were open to abuse. That is why they stipulated very precisely what the techniques should be — not allowing any physical brutality or sexual humiliation. Why they limited the use of such techniques to those few cases where crucial intelligence was likely to be gained. And why they insisted on the prior permission of the senior U.S. general in Iraq for their use.

Of course, most editors and reporters probably take the view that inflicting even this limited and supervised stress to frighten suspects is impermissible. A Washington Post editorial, for instance, argued that no intelligence gain could possibly compensate for the national embarrassment of having a U.S. secretary of State publicly defend such techniques before the international community.

That is certainly arguable. And in general governments should not carry out acts they are unprepared to defend in public. But is it wholly and always persuasive? Suppose, for instance, that inflicting psychological stress and instilling fear into a terrorist suspect seemed likely to help prevent the beheading of another innocent American like Nick Berg? Or to avert another catastrophe such as September 11? Or even to halt a nuclear attack on an American city? Would we not feel that in such cases the end of saving lives justified the means of inflicting psychological stress?

These are serious moral questions — and serious practical questions when the U.S. is waging a war on terror. They cannot be wished away by pious references to the Geneva Convention. And the media's attempt to transform serious consideration of these painful dilemmas into a gung-ho criminal prosecution of Rumsfeld is both a partisan disgrace and a shameful evasion of difficult realities.

Let us finally examine the tally sheet. Selective agonizing, taking dictation from terror, willing gullibility, galloping inferentialism, and criminalizing anti-terrorism — not a short list of media failings for a single week. And when all the mistakes are on the side of opposing the liberation of Iraq, and none of the mistakes favor the U.S. or Britain or Bush or Blair, it tells you something. Namely, which side they're on. Or "tears are shed only from the left eye."

Waging Online Propaganda Warfare
Posted May 20, 2004
By Gene J. Koprowski

http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/05/16/World/Waging.Online.Propaganda.Warfare-682163.shtml

"Four hostile newspapers," Napoleon Bonaparte once said to his generals, "are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets."

Today, the Internet is recasting that famous strategic dictum, still taught to promising military leaders at war colleges in the United States.

During the last two weeks, Internet sites around the world have distributed fabricated photos purporting to show American and British troops abusing prisoners in Iraq. Though quickly discredited by experts, these images of propaganda helped paralyze the Pentagon, created a controversy in England's Parliament and, to varying degrees, produced outrage across the public spectrum in many nations, and dismay and embarrassment among U.S. service personnel.

"The images play against our view of what it means to be an American," said Peter Bardazzi, a filmmaker and director of new media development at New York University. "There's an expectation with the American public that American soldiers are superheroes and that they have a morality," he told United Press International. "But the soldiers lose value as superheroes with the images that have come out lately -- this is a war of images."

Images that were proved false debuted on the Internet, some apparently originating on pornographic sites, and were picked up by leading news organizations, entering mainstream cultures all over the world.

The Daily Mirror, a tabloid newspaper in London, published photos purporting to show British troops urinating on prisoners. The Boston Globe -- a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper -- last week published a photo supposedly of American troops raping an Iraqi woman.

U.S. television networks also produced stories, based on an Internet-distributed video, of Nicholas Berg, an American citizen, being beheaded by Islamic terrorists.

"These images all contain bodies that are dehumanized," said Bardazzi, a former special-effects producer at Industrial Light and Magic, the company owned by moviemaker George Lucas. "There is mutilation and sexual humiliation -- the body has become the new landscape for terror."

Though TV reporters in the Middle East speculated that Berg already was dead when he was beheaded, U.S. reporters generally presented the story without questioning its visual veracity, Bardazzi observed.

"There's no question that without the ability to distribute over the Internet, that beheading image would never have been created," he said. "When people are left alone with new technology, they tend to do things they otherwise wouldn't do."

Bardazzi noted that the pose adopted by the terrorists in the Berg murder video was intended to be cinematic and was "straight out of Lawrence of Arabia. It's meant to portray the terrorists as warriors."

In London, Piers Morgan, editor of the Daily Mirror, resigned under pressure for running the photos portraying British troops relieving themselves on Iraqi prisoners, after the House of Commons questioned the veracity of the images.

The paper ran a banner headline, "Sorry ... We Were Hoaxed," over its apology for the incident on May 15.

Meanwhile, in Boston, the controversy over the Globe's faked images generated less dramatic results. The paper apologized for the error, and Christine Chinlund, the ombudsman, published a column explaining how the incident occurred. But to date no editor has resigned over the matter.

The controversy began last week when Charles Turner, a local politician and city councilman, held a news conference and showed what he said were pictures of American troops raping an Iraqi woman. The paper then published one of the lewd, Internet-generated images, along with a story.

During Turner's news conference, it emerged that the source of the photos was an individual at the Nation of Islam, run by Louis Farrakhan, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq.

"It is an understatement to say that the paper erred," Chinlund told UPI. "There's no excuse for what happened."

The Nation of Islam's public-relations office in Chicago, affiliated with its newspaper, The Final Call, would not respond to questions faxed by UPI to a woman who identified herself as Dora Muhammad and requested that the queries be sent in writing.

"It has been alleged that the images are from a porn site in Europe," Chinlund said. "That may well be right, but I couldn't find them on the Web."

A leading free-speech attorney said the legal situation surrounding publication of images obtained from the Internet -- including those that are misleading -- remains unsettled.

"The law has yet to develop to cover situations of the digital age, like New York Times vs. Sullivan, the famous case in the early 1960s, which said that it was okay to make mistakes when covering a public official, as long as they were not malicious," said Gary Bostwick, a partner in Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP, a Los Angeles law firm. "There hasn't been enough experience with the law to work this out," he told UPI.

The Globe probably covered itself legally by stating, in the story that accompanied the photo, that the images were not verified.

Though there may be no legal damage due to the publication of the faked images, there may be lasting psychological harm for some, said psychologist Tina Tessina. "Lying is dysfunctional and the Internet is a source of a lot of lies now," said Tessina, author of It Ends With You: Grow Up and Out of Dysfunction. "I'm getting a lot of patients in here who have anxiety because of these urban legends that they see online. People are anxious."

There probably are no technological solutions to the problem of faked images being distributed over the Internet, an Internet security expert said. "If you are going to refer to or quote propagandists with a political agenda, you cannot rely on the old dictum that seeing is believing," said Larry Clinton, chief operating officer of the Internet Security Alliance, a project of Carnegie Mellon University and the Electronic Industries Alliance. "Journalists need to ask hard questions about these images -- before they publish them."

Bardazzi said photo editors and TV producers need to eye images from the Internet very carefully. They should check out the lighting, the range of reflected light and the color spectrum of every controversial image. "It's easy to fool someone who is not an expert and get shock value," he said.

The propagandists behind the recent fake images are students of American culture, Bardazzi explained. They understand American values and ideology, even though their productions are somewhat amateurish. Still, they are portraying U.S. troops as if they were like Col. Kurtz, the character played by Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now. U.S. troops are being portrayed as renegade warriors who are "operating outside of the ideology of America," he said.

Bardazzi said the propagandists also are playing off the "corporate" stance the Pentagon has adopted since the war in Iraq. The government exercised heavy control over images from that war, offering such scenes as the green-screen views of precision bombs dropping on buildings that were broadcast repeatedly on CNN and other TV outlets.

Using the embedded reporters in the Iraq war, the Pentagon attempted to control the imagery again and sanitize the perception of the war. "What's been missing is the pathos, the passion of the soldier in combat," Bardazzi said. "Now we're getting mutations of that, which are completely staged, over the Internet."

Gene Koprowski covers telecommunications media for UPI, a sister news organization of Insight.

"A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham"
By James K. Glassman

http://www.techcentralstation.com/052004G.html

Explaining U.S. policies and actions to the world -- and fighting the lies being told about us -- has never been more important. But never have we botched the job so badly.

This job -- promoting the national interest by informing, engaging and influencing -- is called "public diplomacy." We used to be the best at it. With institutions like Radio Free Europe and the USIA, public diplomacy helped win the Cold War, and it has the potential to win the war on terror, saving American lives and money.

But, after the Berlin Wall came down, the U.S. started to dismantle the apparatus of public diplomacy, or P.D. The worst blow came when we disbanded the U.S. Information Agency. Today, the State Department spends just $600 million on public diplomacy -- a joke. Some in the administration even see P.D. as sissified, not for tough policymakers.

Meanwhile, hostility toward the U.S. has reached shocking levels. A March survey by the Pew Center, for example, found 70 percent of Jordanians believe suicide bombings against Americans in Iraq are justifiable and only 8 percent of Pakistanis believe Iraqis will be better off with Saddam gone. And Jordan and Pakistan are our allies.

"A year ago," said Mark Helmke, key aide to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind). "I reported that American public diplomacy was a mess. I said it lacked a strategy, a vision, and money. Today, that situation is worse. American public diplomacy is a disaster."

Some say animosity just comes with the territory. We're the big guy, so we're resented. But we were big after World War II and enjoyed wide admiration. Others say the problem is not our image but our policies and practices. But we're selling the best products in the world: freedom, democracy and prosperity. And look at our enemies; their policy is terror and dictatorship, and their practices are gruesome beheadings and car-bombings.

There's an obvious remedy for our public diplomacy disaster, and it was spelled out in a report issued in October by an advisory group, created by Congress and the administration and headed by former Amb. Edward Djerejian. In two words: Get serious!

The report of the bipartisan Djerejian group, of which I was a member, was widely praised in Congress, the press and the academic community, but it met deafening silence from President Bush and his aides.

Why? Most likely, the President does not want to fix P.D. in an election year because he would have to admit the failures and might be blamed. In fact, three administrations helped destroy P.D., and the worst decisions were taken under Bill Clinton. Besides, these mistakes were understandable and forgivable.

But the current crisis is not.

The single most important P.D. official in the government is the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. But Charlotte Beers left that job in March 2003 and wasn't replaced for nine months. Her successor, Margaret Tutwiler, an able diplomat and information specialist, made it clear she didn't want the job, She said last month she's leaving June 30.

Meanwhile, the Board of Broadcasting Governors, which operates independently of the rest of the P.D. system and has a budget nearly as big as the State Department's, has closed the Arabic service of Voice of America and started Radio Sawa, which mainly plays pop music. An expensive U.S. satellite-TV network in the Mideast has promise -- but it's not clear whether its goal is to build audience or actually change minds.

Public diplomacy today, as Woody Allen said in an utterly different context, is "a travesty of a mockery of a sham." But it requires only a single step to fix. Just as the President declared war on terror, he needs to declare a mobilization of public diplomacy to support that war -- to eviscerate our enemies in the battle of ideas and images. He'll find eager warriors in the public and private sectors.

He should begin by naming a Cabinet-level counselor in the White House to set and monitor an overall P.D. strategy for State, Defense, broadcasting and the rest of government. It's incredible, but we don't have a strategy today.

The U.S. is home to Madison Avenue and Hollywood, to the world's best political polling and commercial marketing. But we are failing miserably to win hearts and minds, not just in the Middle East but around the world. There's no excuse. None at all.

Selective Indignation
By Joel Mowbray

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13466

To the casual observer, the situation in Iraq is bleak, the Iraqi people don't really want democracy, and the U.S. has instituted an evil, widespread program of brutality and intimidation of Iraqi prisoners.

To the "casual observer" of the mainstream media, that is.

Although common sense and a semi-continuous pulse would be enough to notice the media's pack mentality in its Iraq coverage, the numbers paint a compelling, and disturbing, picture.

On any given day, Americans are treated to maybe a dozen stories highlighting the good deeds being done by coalition forces, building bridges, literally and figuratively, and generally improving daily life for ordinary Iraqis, and that's among all cable news outlets and hundreds of newspapers and magazines.

How many Americans know about the five million Iraqis who are now returning to school or the many non-Baathist professionals who are now finally earning a decent salary?

True, most of that can be explained away as much less a function of "liberal bias" as much as the media's constant obsession with presenting attention-grabbing stories.

That's why we've been inundated with literally thousands of hand-wringing stories about the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. And as with any story where there is footage or images, the visual component inherently gives it that much more life.

But all that can be said about the savage slaughter of American Nicholas Berg at the hands of terrorists, and then some. The numbers speak for themselves.

From May 11 to May 19, there were more than 6,600 stories in the Lexis-Nexis news database with "Abu Ghraib" somewhere in the text. During the same span, there were just over 3,000 with both "Berg" and "Iraq."

To fully appreciate the significance of those statistics, though, the prisoner abuse story was already two weeks old at that point, and the news of Berg's beheading broke on May 11.

Why is this important? Because the "noise", the collective impact of news from various sources, has been so focused on Abu Ghraib, the political backdrop is the savagery of Americans, not that of the terrorists we are fighting.

In some respects, the terrorists are winning more favorable coverage.
The terrorists who cut off the 26-year-old American's head claimed their brutality was revenge for the prisoner abuses. The news media bit. More than half of all stories on Berg mentioned Abu Ghraib, with many leading newspapers running the story with "revenge" or "vengeance" in the headline.

But since when can terrorists be taken at face value? Just because the terrorists claim a certain motive doesn't mean it is so. Before the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced, terrorists didn't exactly lack for motivation to kill Americans.

With all the attention on "revenge" or "vengeance," another possible motive has been almost universally ignored.

Less than 10% of stories on Berg stated that he was Jewish, not an unimportant fact when radical Islamic terrorists say "Death to Israel" or "Death to the Jews" like most people breathe.

It's plausible that Berg's religion was not a factor in his death. But according to news reports, he had an Israeli stamp in his passport, and it's more than likely that his murderers knew he was Jewish.

At the very least, it is important data point that cannot be ignored.
But ignoring is something at which the media specialize.

Consider that during the same May 11 - May 19 period, there were more than 2,500 stories on Fallujah or Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite cleric who is leading a spirited rebellion, with relatively few followers, in the south.

The particular focus on al-Sadr, in fact, has enhanced the perception among many Americans that Shi'ites are radicals who oppose the very concept of democracy.

And why wouldn't they believe that when the mainstream media has produced precious few stories on the many peaceful demonstrations”led by Shi'ites”calling for al-Sadr to lay down his arms? Look at the numbers: of the 1,571 stories in Lexis-Nexis on al-Sadr, only 31 also contain "peaceful demonstration" (or its plural).

The most glaring example, though, of the media seeing no evil - literally - is with the discovery of sarin gas this week. Sarin gas has been used by thugs from the Nazis to Saddam himself (in killing Kurds by the thousands before the Gulf War), and a shell containing the toxin accidentally detonated on Monday. It is, in short, a weapon of mass destruction. Yes, a WMD was found, and that's on top of mustard gas discovered the previous week.

From Monday through Wednesday, Lexis-Nexis found exactly 136 stories. None was high-profile: USA Today gave it page ten treatment, and the New York Times buried it on page 11. At least those outlets covered it; the Washington Post did not.

For some context, Lexis-Nexis logged more than ten times as many stories on Abu Ghraib”just during those three days. And though it pretended no WMD were found in Iraq, the Washington Post ran 21 stories from Monday to Wednesday on Abu Ghraib.

With the June 30 deadline to transfer power to the Iraqi people approaching, the Post on Wednesday offered the following page-one headline: "U.S. Faces Growing Fears of Failure." Media groupthink dictates that the next buzzword to watch is "failure."

Kinda describes the media's selective outrage in covering the war in Iraq, doesn't it?

Joel Mowbray is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America's Security.