Posted on 12/16/2003 9:31:54 AM PST by Hillary's Lovely Legs
So this was the man who had terrorized nations and murdered millions. He looked more like one of those sad old urban alcoholics who make their homes in alleys out of cardboard boxes. But as television viewers saw early Sunday, it was in fact the face of Saddam Hussein, the infamous Iraqi dictator who along with terrorist monster Osama bin Laden had been one of the two most hunted men in the world.
CNN, the pioneering cable news network, was first to note -- at 5:03 Sunday morning -- that reports indicated Hussein had been captured, pulled, in effect, out of a rathole outside Tikrit. The broadcast networks and other cable networks followed swiftly. Dan Rather of CBS News, known for his almost superhuman tenacity, was on the air an awesome six hours, from 6:15 a.m. until about 20 minutes past noon.
Video at first was limited to enjoyably humiliating footage of Hussein, in a large scraggly beard, being searched for lice and undergoing some kind of oral examination. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, soon made it stunningly official in what are likely to be the most quoted words of the week, or at least the next few days: "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him."
All the major network anchors showed up except for Peter Jennings of ABC News, where the chore was handled mainly by Charles Gibson, co-anchor of the network's weekday "Good Morning, America" program (expanding to a seven-day week sometime next year). First, George Stephanopoulos hosted a special edition of ABC's struggling "This Week," with clarifying analysis provided by regular panelist George F. Will and three senators.
This effort was upstaged by a full-tilt, battle-alert, expanded edition of NBC's top-rated "Meet the Press," with Tom Brokaw of "NBC Nightly News" joining moderator Tim Russert. The impact on U.S. politics was hardly ignored. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), interviewed by Russert, tried to take some of the credit for Hussein's capture by boasting of how supportive he'd been of the war. This was a slap -- one of many to be delivered during coverage Sunday -- at former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who until Sunday was considered the front-runner among Democrats for the party's presidential nomination.
There was widespread agreement, as the saying goes, on virtually every network that the Bush administration's triumph in capturing Hussein was very bad news for Dean, a constant critic of the war now left looking like a monkey whose organ grinder had run away. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), on CBS later in the morning, pointedly and shamelessly criticized Dean's "lack of foreign policy experience" and said of the Democrats, "We need someone who has experience in foreign policy" in order to beat Bush next November. Hint, hint.
Inevitably but not obnoxiously, President Bush appeared later in the day (12:15 p.m.) from the White House to make the capture of Hussein official, or more official than it was up to that point. On CNN, anchor Paula Zahn had said that the White House wanted to avoid "the perception of gloating" over the victory, and on the same network later, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) declared, "Of course the president will not gloat." ABC's White House correspondent Terry Moran, the man with the million-dollar lips, also said from the snowy White House lawn, "This is a no-gloat zone this morning."
And sure enough, when Bush appeared, speaking from the Cabinet Room of the West Wing, he was temperate and relatively low-key about what a "hopeful day" this was. Now and then he seemed about to break into a conquering grin, and probably no one would have blamed him, but he kept his cool. Even the setting was austere.
On ABC, Stephanopoulos contrasted Bush's comparatively soft-spoken presentation with the administration's now-notorious and decidedly premature "Mission Accomplished" spectacle staged aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier. This was the TV event that featured Bush arriving from the heavens in a military jet and soaking up the adulation of military men and women who functioned as a hired cheering section. Stephanopoulos suggested that the White House had learned its lesson from that egregious exercise in self-congratulatory overkill.
NBC titled its coverage "The Capture of Saddam," while ABC chose the considerably more optimistic "The End of Saddam." The End? Not likely, especially if the former dictator is put on trial at some courthouse in the global village and given a worldwide audience for his ranting and rhetoric. But who will try him and where and when this will occur were matters very much undecided Sunday. People were too happy about his capture to worry very much, at least in public, about future details.
Rather on CBS did report grimly that even as America relished this golden moment, reports had arrived of yet another U.S. serviceman losing his life in Iraq. " Optimism was, as is so often the case in the Mideast, diluted by political inscrutability.
CNN may have beaten the other networks with the first cautious reports of Hussein's capture -- if only by minutes -- partly because, a spokeswoman said, it was the only network to have two correspondents in Tikrit. The network had at least one exclusive, footage of U.S. soldiers who took part in the raid celebrating the victory, but this footage was replayed too often without being clearly identified.
Aaron Brown, another CNN anchor, continued in his tradition of seeming to think The Big Thought and finding his own analysis at least as important as the facts. "There are a million things I wish I knew," he said at one point, ruminating on his own insatiable curiosity and implying it was a great virtue. In a similar vein, ABC's Gibson, anticipating the president's remarks, said, "I'm more interested in his body language than in what he has to say." But are we at home all that interested in what interests Charlie and Aaron? They're supposed to be worrying about what will interest us.
Chris Wallace showed up to anchor coverage on cable's Fox News Channel. Fellow anchor Brit Hume said the capture of Hussein "lifts a tremendous burden of fear from the Iraqi people." Somewhat surprisingly, Fox featured not one but two NPR reporters among its guest commentators. Fox is considered very conservative and NPR is considered very liberal. Perhaps this occasion was so momentous that even political labels and ideological fixations could be cast aside. At least for a few hours.
C-SPAN, too, was actively and distinctively involved in the coverage -- airing, among other things, a tape of the entire news conference from the Iraqi Governing Council that contained the announcement that Hussein had been taken into custody. On other networks, only snippets of this were seen. C-SPAN, the network of record, remains an invaluable component of the spectrum.
Over and over again, meanwhile, we saw the footage of the bedraggled old man who'd been pulled out of a "spider hole" being searched for lice and subjected to a public medical exam. In an instant, television had scaled him down from a mythic if despised icon to a pitiful helpless captive. I can't find the phrase "banality of evil" in my notes, but surely someone must have used it during the coverage. It seemed, as so many times in history, inescapably appropriate.
hahahahahahaha
This is not American English; not an expression associated with the mug shot of a bank robber or a mass murderer. Not in my entire life have I seen a criminal described this way by an American reporter.
This is clearly a conscious effort to use the enemy's cultural agitprop to report what is clearly an outstanding American coup. A statement calculated either to inflame the sandmaggots, or to validate their existing "outrage" agitprop.
I would classify this as clearly treasonous.
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