Military Atrocities Less Newsworthy Than Right-Wing Fantasies (FAIR)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3155

8/6/07

The Nation's investigation into the U.S. occupation's impact on Iraqi civilians (7/30/07) and a series of columns by a U.S. soldier published in the New Republic (2/5/07, 6/4/07, 7/23/07) have given media access to compelling new documentation of egregious behavior by U.S. troops in Iraq. The New York Times and Washington Post have responded by paying much less attention to the scrupulously documented evidence of these abuses in the Nation and focusing on right-wing bloggers' unsubstantiated criticisms of the New Republic columns.

The Nation's article was based on interviews with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq War, whose accounts were recorded in thousands of pages of transcripts. According to the report's authors, Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, their "investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the U.S. military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions." Meanwhile, the New Republic series was based on eyewitness accounts by a single soldier, Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who wrote under the pseudonym Thomas Scott for fear of reprisals by his superiors. Beauchamp later explained (New Republic, 7/26/07) that his columns were intended merely to offer "one soldier's view of events in Iraq."

Despite the New Republic columns' more modest scope, the series has garnered much more extensive media coverage over the past three weeks than the Nation's report. It has been mentioned in six Washington Post articles and has been the topic of two New York Times news articles, while the Nation article has been covered only in one column by Bob Herbert (New York Times, 7/10/07) since it was published online on July 9.

The Weekly Standard (7/19/07) responded to the New Republic series by openly challenging the authenticity of the columnist's accounts, and was soon joined in this effort by the U.S. military public affairs department. A U.S. military public affairs officer confirmed to blogger Matt Sanchez (American Spectator blog, 7/21/07) the military's "intent to engage the CENTCOM blog team." (According to the Department of Defense's publication DefenseLink--3/2/06--the U.S. Armed Forces' Central Command "blog team" was formed to "work with more than 250 bloggers to try to disseminate news about the good work being done by U.S. forces in the global war on terror," and to correct online information about the U.S. military that is, in the view of U.S. military public affairs personnel, "inaccurate" and "incomplete.")


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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3155