War Is Not A Video Game II

Commentary By Ron Beasley

I covered the decision by AP to run the picture of dying Marine Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard in War In War Is Not A Video Game.

I remember watching the TV news sometime in the late 60's when a
reporter in Vietnam was hit while reporting.  The war came to the
living rooms of America.  I think it's healthy and necessary that
Americans see that war is all about blood and death.  There have been
attempts to sanitize the news so that Americans can't see the blood and
guts and death.  They try to make war a video game where the blood
isn't real.  Now I hate to defend AP but I guess I'm going to have to.

I occasionally visit Libertarian sites because we can agree on issues of war and foreign policy.  Over at LewRockwell.com Fred Reed comes to APs defense - Killing America's Kids.

The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn�t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the web:

�Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard's family is feeling right now, and that Curley's �lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right � but judgment and common decency.��

I thought a long time before writing about this matter, and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless Secretary, I too was a Marine Lance Corporal of twenty-one years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) thirteenth trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.

How sorry can Gates be?

But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the US.

But Gates. The words �decency� and �unconscionable� coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. �Intelligence� agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK � they�re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.

Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don�t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don�t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?

Nearly every American war since WWII has been fought not to defend the citizens of the United States but to defend the bottom line of arms makers and large corporations.  With that in mind those citizens need to see what war is all about.

Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still�slowly�moving, the dead children, the�never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.

Note:

It continues --

GANGIGAL, Afghanistan � Four U.S. Marines died Tuesday when they
walked into a well-laid ambush by insurgents in Afghanistan's eastern
Kunar province. Seven Afghan troops and an interpreter for the Marine
commander also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle, which
lasted some seven hours.

Three American service members and 14 Afghan security force members were wounded.

It
was the largest number of American military trainers to die in a single
incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.