May 09, 2004

Soldier's Family Set in Motion Chain of Events on Disclosure

Ivan Frederick was distraught. His son, an Army reservist turned prison guard in Iraq, was under investigation earlier this year for mistreating prisoners, and photographs of the abuse were beginning to circulate among soldiers and military investigators.

So the father went to his brother-in-law, William Lawson, who was afraid that reservists like his nephew would end up taking the fall for what he considered command lapses, Mr. Lawson recounted in an interview on Friday. He knew whom to turn to: David Hackworth, a retired colonel and a muckraker who was always willing to take on the military establishment. Mr. Lawson sent an e-mail message in March to Mr. Hackworth's Web site and got a call back from an associate there in minutes, he said.
[Isn't that special? Called back within minutes so eager was he.--Jen]
That e-mail message would put Mr. Lawson in touch with the CBS News program "60 Minutes II" and help set in motion events that led to the public disclosure of the graphic photographs and an international crisis for the Bush administration.

It is still not entirely clear who leaked the photos and how they got into the hands of a "60 Minutes II" producer.
[Oh, "Hack" knows all about getting this stuff to the Media.--]
What is clear, however, is that the furor over the photos is unlikely to dissipate any time soon.

Don't know who Hack is?
Lucky you.
He did 5 tours of duty in Vietnam, then quit the armed forces and began to oppose that war, the WOT and anything involving the Pentagon ever since.
(Remind you of anyone that's currently running for President?)
In fact, he even wrote a book about how he felt about the Vietnam War called "About Face" in which he criticized the military for the way the war was being "run."
(Word has it that Hack was bitter he'd never been promoted to General--that's because he was a grandstander and a hot dog--and left to complain.)
And the Colonel's had a hate on for Donald Rumsfeld for a long time and has lately taken to calling Rummy an "asshole" in Slate Magazine interview and on TV.
The Abu Ghraib scandal isn't his first time to his dance with the media, however.
When CNN/Time's star reporter Peter Arnett broke a "story" about an alleged war atrocity that took place in Laos in 1970 during the Vietnam war, it was Hackworth, curiously, who came forward to defend the soldiers' side of the story.
Arnett reported that he had "proof" that U.S. soldiers in Laos in 1970 had used poison gas on American "defectors", and Laotian noncombatants (of which the report maintained there were "many" which of course later proved to be false) during Operation Tailwind.
The story got lots of airplay on CNN.
More anguish, which Vietnam tales of alleged war crimes always seem to bring, followed until the story was finally and inevitably disproven and dismissed.
Arnett, who had put CNN in the forefront of American TV with his "Live from Baghdad" coverage for them during the onset of Gulf War I and who was considered a "star," was fired from CNN for peddling the story.*
(*Why would CNN run with such an inflammatory, but unsubstantiated, story about Vietnam "war crimes?" Well, at the time, Ted Turner was married to anti-war activist "Hanoi" Jane Fonda.)
Baghdad Peter was not to turn up on America's radar again until the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, reporting the war from Baghdad again for MSNBC, when it became clear that his bias was all-too-biased in favor of Saddam Hussein.
Arnett was summarily fired again in the middle of the invasion and turned up briefly still reporting from Baghad for London's lurid tabloid "The Daily Mirror," which not coincidentally was one of the first "papers" to carry the Abu Ghraib pictures and which is still peddling the story today, an attempt to suck in British soldiers in Iraq into the scandal.
[Don't forget to click on the link for Arnett's Daily Mirror op ed "This war is not working," datelined Baghdad on April 1,2003, 8 days before Saddam's statue was pulled down!--J.T.]
The blogosphere should recall that the Daily Mirror is also the press home of Mr. "I'd beat me up, too, if I were you," John Pilger.

I'm sure that while many of you were reading this, bells of remembrance were going off.
Yes, when it comes to the attacks of the Fifth Column in this war, it seems there are no new players.
Attacks from the Left on our war effort, on President Bush and his Administration, and on America itself all come from the now AARP-aged "Flower children" and "people of conscience" who either protested the Vietnam War in a big way or were active in the bloodless coup that brought President Nixon down called Watergate or both: Robert McNamara, John Dean, Bob Woodward, Jane Fonda, Col. Hackworth, John Kerry, Ramsey Clark, Seymour Hersh--all blasts from the past circa the "Summer of Love."
If these people have a problem with this country and what she stands for, why don't they shut up and leave for one that suits them better...like North Korea or China?
I, for one, have had it with them.
And they've yanked my chain for the last time!
I suppose some of our soldiers guarding POWs in Iraq were out of line in their treatment of those criminals, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if the lion's share of this scandal were manufactured purposefully to discredit the WOT, President Bush and SecDef Rumsfeld.
The aim of these--dare we say it?--traitors is to regain political power, but it matters not one whit to them what damage they do to the image of Americans and the soldiers of the Coalition in our own eyes, those of our families and loved ones and those of people living in other countries (particularly in the Middle East, Asia and Africa) with whom we are trying to establish the moral and ethical highground in our stand for equal rights, liberty and democracy.
That's because this group of enemies of our country think Marxism (or their "Third Way" of Transnational Progressivism as they dub it now) is preferable.
Stop listening to them, America!
To put it plainly, they lie and want power.
Don't let this "story" have anymore "legs" than it's already had!