Democracy Now! is covering this weekend's Winter Soldiers: Iraq and Afghanistan event organized by the IVAW (and covered succinctly on Wired). This essential story was virtually a nonevent in the mainstream media, but NPR did give it coverage on Sunday's ATC.Credit where credit is due.
3 comments:
I was happy to hear that NPR had run something on Winter Soldier II, but then I listened to the all-of-three-minutes report. The examples seemed carefully selected not to offend: a soldier mentions that the rules of engagement allowed firing on vehicles that got too close to convoys (sounds reasonable, most listeners will think), and another mentions a prisoner being denied food, water, and sleep for three days (unpleasant, but hey, it's war, most listeners will think). Meanwhile, yesterday's Democracy Now! also featured two soldiers' testimony, but they spoke of indiscriminate shooting of civilians, terrorizing families in the middle of the night, indiscrimately emptying machine guns into buildings, etc. Here I was all set to thank NPR for having the decency to at least mention these hearings, but then the one tiny story they run turns out to be sanitized beyond recognition. Honestly, I fear that any good NPR-listening, tote-bag-toting upper-middle-class white liberal who takes NPR's story as an adequate representation of the Winter Soldier hearings will come away with a grossly mistaken view of the testimony there -- and, by extension, of the full awfulness of what's gone on in their names in this inglorious little war. But then that was probably NPR's intention. I realize that covering NPR so closely has probably made you admirably eager to be charitable toward them for even small steps in the right direction, Mytwords, but I'm not sure that your credit is really due to them in this case, either. Alas.
--nashtbrutusandshort
Categorical Aperitif
Alas, you're probably right...sigh.
Frick, they suck the SOUL out of any report of substance! Kinda like how Pringles does it with potatoes.
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