Right Wing Nut House

In honor of Armed Forces Day, I thought it would be appropriate to hear from someone who is directly affected - in a true-to-life-and-death way - by the anti-military bias so prevalent in the MSM.

Dadmanly bills his blog as “Just one man’s point of view, from the heart of Mesopotamia.” The uncommon common man just happens to be one of the more eloquent and passionate members of our military I’ve read to date.

Following the Newsweek imbroglio, Dadmanly had some thoughts that go straight to the heart and soul of the issue of consequences. Consequences for the troops. Consequences for the American people. Consequences for our image abroad:

You are creating greater risk for me personally. You are creating incredible hostility in Muslim countries due to incessant negative reporting out of context and ignoring orders of magnitude of good news in doing so. Yet, in your jaded imaginations, you believe every misconception you spin is ever more confirmation of what you always knew about the U.S. Military. These unrelenting Vietnam analogies are like press versions of drug addled flashbacks.

You create added danger for my soldiers. You feed into enemy (yes, enemy) propaganda efforts in yielding unlimited access to pre-staged voices with calculated intent. You are entirely ignorant of the countries you claim to cover, and you know as little about the U.S. Military, its culture, climate, training, procedures, and ways of operation. You diminish and demean our service.

You cause greater concern, fear and worry for our friends and family. You expand pinpoints of data into grossly distorted exaggerations of fact, and paint broad brush strokes of violence without any context or comparison to relative levels elsewhere. You have no sense of proportion or equivalence. You have no regard for collateral damage, and yet see imagined carnage with every surgical strike, precision bomb, or targeted raid. You can speak of cities destroyed with the destruction of a single building.

Lack of “context” is something that seems to me to be the biggest sin of the MSM. In fact, this is why the charge of bias rings so true. Dadmanly points out that every major accusation of abuse came not from the press, but from the military itself.

We are proud of our Military, our Country, and how, for over 200 years, the U.S. has tried to improve both ourselves and the world around us, usually for little thanks and much scorn and insult. We police ourselves. Every scandal you report, from My Lai to Iran Contra to Abu Ghraib, has been first reported to authorities by military personnel. And that has resulted in prosecutions and punishment. And what do you stress in your reporting? The sins, crimes, and misdemeanors and rarely if ever remark on the ability and willingness for us to identify and correct malfeasance in our ranks.

Never, never claim to support the soldiers, you don’t, you never will in any meaningful way until you can see your prejudices for what they are, work to eliminate them, and for once try to view the world with an open and not a closed mind. You need to rethink how you consider the idea of a just war after 9/11. You need to acknowledge that you don’t know the modern U.S. Military or the men and women who serve.

As an example, yesterday’s New York Times carried a 5000 word screed on the deaths of two Afghans at Bagram Air Force base back in 2002. It isn’t until the 20th paragraph that we find out that after completing its investigation, the army feels that charges should be brought against 27 individuals:

Even though military investigators learned soon after Mr. Dilawar’s death that he had been abused by at least two interrogators, the Army’s criminal inquiry moved slowly. Meanwhile, many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were “remarkably similar” to those used at Bagram.

Last October, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command concluded that there was probable cause to charge 27 officers and enlisted personnel with criminal offenses in the Dilawar case ranging from dereliction of duty to maiming and involuntary manslaughter. Fifteen of the same soldiers were also cited for probable criminal responsibility in the Habibullah case.

So the New York Times is pissed that the army 1) took so long and 2) didn’t keep the press updated throughout the investigation. By burying information that, if placed upfront, would have put the entire incident in a different context, the Times writers proved themselves to be either lousy journalists or horribly biased.

Which do you believe it is?

Go read the whole rant by this dedicated soldier. On Armed Forces Day, it’s the least you can do.