CNN Parrots Pentagon on Prisoner Abuse Photos

by Dave Bennion

category: Foreign Policy

Published May 14, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT

I was watching CNN in the gym this morning, and the mornings top headlines were coming through.  First up was President Obama's decision to reverse the DOJ and not release additional photos of prisoner abuse.

First, the newscaster announced the policy and its rationale.

Second, they cut to commentator Barbara Starr, whose affiliation I didn't initially catch, but who affirmed the president's decision.

Third up was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates justifying the decision in what looked like a congressional hearing or press conference.

Starr defended the president's decision so firmly, without examining any arguments against it, that when I saw the subheading under her name read "Pentagon," I assumed she was a spokesperson for the military.

It turns out she is CNN's correspondent at the Pentagon, but she might as well be paid by the Pentagon for her dutiful stenography on this issue.  At least she has consistently opposed the release of the photos-HuffPost's Jeremy Scahill wrote about this back in 2006, quoting Starr in one of her appearances on CNN:

As we look at a couple of the photographs, let's remind people that why these are so inappropriate. Under U.S. military law and practice and procedure, you simply cannot take photographs -- as we're going to show you some of them right now. You cannot take photographs of people in detention, in humiliating positions, positions that are abusive in any way, shape or form. The only pictures that are ever allowed of people in U.S. military detention would be pictures for documentation purposes. And, clearly, these pictures are not that. That is the whole issue that has been at the root of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, that it was abusive, the practices in which soldiers engaged in.

In other words, the problem was not the abuse of the prisoners, but the "abusive practice" of documenting those acts without authorization.  It's not the torture that was wrong, but the fact that soldiers were taking photos and circulating them.

Reacting to Starr's argument that "it would spark violence in the Arab world to see these photographs and it would put U.S. military forces at risk," Scahill responded:

The release of the photographs will spark the violence? No--US torture of prisoners sparks massive outrage and justifiably so. Moreover, this outrage should not just be confined to the "Arab world" but should be felt everywhere, particularly in the US.

I see that little has changed since 2006.  It is the attitude of "my country, right or wrong" that drove the U.S. to war in Iraq, that led to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, that enabled so many in the government to torture detainees or acquiesce to that torture, and that leads to airstrikes in Afghanistan that periodically kill large numbers of civilians.  It also allows us to lock up foreign nationals en masse inside the U.S. with little concern for human rights, family unity, or common sense.  And CNN, along with the other cable networks and many of the country's newspapers, has enabled and promoted this flawed narrative.