Can the Pentagon charge Kevin Sites?

How???? It was exposed, exposed again, became the subject of an infinite number of perspectiveless discussions by the media, and USED and EXPLOITED in such a way as to call into question EVERYTHING about the War, with the handful of American soldiers involved in the humiliating rituals being sold as symbolic and emblematic of the Military and indicative of the wrongheadedness of the whole enterprise.

I didn't say it wasn't used or exploited, nor would I disagree that it's being presented by some as "indicative of the wrongheadedness of the whole enterprise."

But you said it was manipulated and I'm asking you how it was manipulated.

I have to seriously differ from your reductionism in referring to this situation as something being done by "a handful of American soldiers". The atmosphere and license for these activities came right from the top. (If you consider Gonzales and Rumsfeld the "top", as the president's counsel and secretary of defense, respectively.)

"the atmosphere and license for these activities came right from the top..."
----Ahhhh, just when you were doing so well, (especially for a Newbie) you show yourself to be someone willing to assume something you can't possibly know, but only want to believe. If all this came right from the top, I guess everyone who DIDN'T participate in the abuse should be up on charges, right? Atmosphere and license is one very wide and amorphous concept. Were there no monitors checking up on the behavior of our soldiers at Abu Ghraib every day, carrying around a playbook and demanding reports on how each and every prisoner was being treated each and every day? Of course not. Were all those prisoners wrongly imprisoned innocents who HADN'T, COULDN'T POSSIBLY HAVE participated in beheadings, incinerating coalition forces and hanging their charred remains from bridges,etc. While I was revolted by the behavior on a personal level, for the media to exploit it as if it's the most terrible thing that could have happened WITHIN THE WIDER GENERAL HORROR OF WAR
is almost laughable.

You still haven't answered my question about the use of the word "manipulated".

you show yourself to be someone willing to assume something you can't possibly know, but only want to believe.

Please, don't lecture me on "wanting to believe". First of all, is there any doubt in your mind what anybody here, including me, would believe, if any other country in the world treated American prisoners in exactly the same fashion by any other country and if as much documented evidence came to light about that country's policies regarding prisoners? Are you in any doubt that the North Vietnamese torture of prisoners was policy? Are you in any doubt that the Japanese treatment of prisoners in WWII was policy? Are you in any doubt that the Iraqi treatment of prisoners during Saddam's reign was policy? Did you have (prior to the war) documented evidence that those policies went right up to Saddam? Secondly, if you think I want to believe that our government sanctions torture, you're very sadly mistaken. I didn't want to believe, nor DID I believe that My Lai was anything but an aberration. Nor do I believe differently to this day. But you'd be right in assuming that I do not believe the refusal to honor Red Cross requests for standard wartime information is the act of a handful of low level individuals.

Ok, I said the top, specifically Rumsfeld and Gonzales. Well, since I'm not great on recollecting details and can't recall off the top of my head where to find the documented memos from Rumsfeld on that score, I'll drop that one. But Gonzales and his memos are a very different matter. It has nothing to do with anything I want to believe.

You ask about people who did not participate in abuses and whether they should be up on charges. Well, you tell me? What were the principles of Nuremberg?

Atmosphere and license is one very wide and amorphous concept.

There's no argument that atmosphere and license are very hard to quantify, but to argue that they aren't important or even that they aren't major factors in these things is to deny reality. Corporations know better about such things - the smart ones, the really big ones, spend huge amounts of money on experts in such vague and amorphous areas because they know that these things make huge differences in money - they may be hard to quantify, but money is not. And these factors, that you wish to dismiss so easily because they're more difficult to quantify, are hugely important in the behaviour of an organization collectively, regardless of what that organization is a business or an army.

Now, if you insist, I'll locate and post documented evidence on Gonzales' influence in these things. And if I do, I think we'll see then who is influenced by what they WANT to believe. Since Gonzales at the time had no actual direct decision making power, I guess we'll just have to ask ourselves if we want to believe that his bosses (such as the president of the United States) just ignored his advice or not and which was more likely, given the microscopic evidence.

Sometimes finding out what one's own government is doing is like gathering intelligence. You gather scattered bits of information and then you make guesses as to what the most likely conclusions are that one can make about the broader picture. If you want to call that "wanting to believe", go ahead.

But dare I suggest that on many other things, that many people will quite happily assume that where there is smoke, there must be fire?

Given your definition of "manipulated", I don't think there's anything in your original statement (in this particular discussion) to disagree with. If I recall correctly, you were contending that the Sites' video would be manipulated ("put forth as") to suggest that the entire exercise was wrong. That's probably true. Or, if I were to quibble, I would only say that the "reception" of that news would have that effect on many people. (You see, I don't think the public is manipulated so much by the news as the public is manipulating the news as it ingests it, so what is received is, as you put it before, distorted to fit preconceptions.

I take your point about posts not being picked up as intended. I think this is because most of us are far more used to talking than to writing. Even if we write as we talk, literally, the effect will not be the same as if we had actually spoken the message to another. There is an art in writing to give the effect of "sounding" just like one speaks, which cannot actually be how one speaks at all. The principle is akin to the principle of naturalism on television - to make something realistic appearing is not the same as literally being realistic. Take Hill Street Blues, for instance.

Anyway, I understood your point and I tried to imagine us as two acquaintances in an actual conversation and I could see that the same words that you used in that post, given other aspects of tone, body languages, etc., would most likely not have come across as lecturing.

I noticed, btw, in your other most recent post to milford, that you seem to refer to the media as if it's an entity with a single mind, such as a very large organization might be. I'd like to take you up on this (in as friendly a fashion as possible, lest you feel like you're getting a lecture :-)) if I may.

I don't think the media functions as a single entity with common purpose. To the extent that an editor or publisher might create parameters, any single given element of the media, may have some sense of a unified direction. And in that case, since most journalists tend toward liberal in the US context (I'll expound on that little qualification in a minute), one might expect most media outlets to lean liberally. However, in more recent decades, with corporate ownership of more and more media outlets, I would imagine this would have swung to the other side of the coin, as most corporate CEO's tend to lean toward a more conservative viewpoint. After all, no matter how "objective" any given journalist might attempt to be, he's inevitably going to be influenced by his or her own politics - BUT he or she will be even more influenced by the demands of the job and the paycheck. The percentage of journalists who would be willing to risk sacrificing themselves for their beliefs is probably about as high a percentage of any other grouping of people - which is not very high, to put it mildly.

I would argue that this myth of a liberal media, which may or may not have ever existed in the past, has been gone now for some decades.

The reason I specified "in the US context" above is that the American media has always been a right wing media if looked at from a global standpoint. Every country, like most individuals, believes itself to be the measuring stick by which moderation can be judged. Thus during China's cultural revolution, a large number of people were seen as "reactionaries" even though from the outside they were clearly communist - they were just less extreme communists than those who wielded power during that time. By the same token, an American liberal, is only seen as liberal as set against his fellow countrymen, but is not really a liberal at all from a broader perspective. As loosely as "commie" is used these days in referring to a certain category of American citizen, real communists/marxists always hated American liberals far more than they did American conservatives. And from that same perspective, the media is hardly liberal, so if it does indeed function with that common purpose as your words suggest, it would be a conservative purpose, albeit that it might be LESS conservative than some would like.

Yes, I know I've opened a real can of worms here. :-)

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