I received the confirmation of authorship call from the Sun-Times within a few hours of emailing my LTTE, but it has not yet appeared. Naturally, I'd like it to!
Birth of a free press is victory for Iraqis, @
http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi?getReferrer=http://www.suntimes.com/output/otherviews/cst-edt-ref16.htmlMay 16, 2006
BY DONALD H. RUMSFELD
In the early months of 2003, as the coalition offered Saddam Hussein's regime a final opportunity to comply with the United Nations Security Council, an Iraqi nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" served as a spokesman for Iraq's Information Ministry. He was not exactly a poster child for accuracy.
When coalition troops took control of Baghdad's airport, this spokesman was on television denying they were there, saying such reports were "lies" or "a Hollywood movie." Even when shown video footage of U.S. soldiers on Saddam's parade grounds, just around the corner from where he was standing, "Baghdad Bob" said, "There is nothing going on." So outlandish were his assertions that he became a ridiculous celebrity of sorts. Some enterprising folks even set up a Web site and sold CDs with some of his statements.
Of course, reporters' experiences with Iraq's regime were usually not amusing. Iraqi journalists had to be members of the ruling Baath party as well as an organization called the Journalists' Union, chaired by one of Saddam's sons. Any reporting considered insulting to Saddam was punishable by death. On occasion, journalists' tongues were cut out. In 2000, in what must have been a bitter joke to the Iraqi people, Uday Hussein -- a butcher and tyrant and one of Saddam's sons -- was "elected" Journalist of the Century.
Even in a region of the world known for tightly controlled societies, Iraq consistently ranked as one of the most oppressive when it came to the press. That included foreign journalists as well. A CNN executive much later admitted that he had downplayed the crimes of Saddam's regime to avoid getting kicked out of the country.
<snip>
And my response:
Dear Sirs:
Thank you so much for the opinion piece by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in Monday's paper, although I thought it should have more properly been in the Comics section. Oh, the high hilarity of Sec. Rumsfeld pontificating on the virtues of a free press and the benefits accruing to the Iraqi people -- those we haven't killed yet, that is. Don, you wacky funster, you kill me!
After all, to speak of a "free" press in Iraq while the Dept. of Defense is paying to plant "good news" stories, true or not, is rich. And Rumsfeld's characterization of "Baghdad Bob" as something less than a "poster child for accuracy?" On its own, that should get him a show on Comedy Central. With the whoppers he's told, we should be calling Rumsfeld "D.C. Don." This is the man, remember, who famously said on Meet the Press, then denied having said it, "We know where (the WMDs) are; they're in the area around Tikrit,...." When a genuine advocate of freedom, former career CIA officer Ray McGovern called out Rumsfeld on his mendacity, Don could only stammer inanities in response. His allusion to the "bitter joke" of Uday Hussein being "elected" Journalist of the Century was a highlight, too; there are many who can recall a more bitter joke of an "election" in 2000, and that one put Rumsfeld in his current office.
I could go on, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, pointing out the absurdity of this pathologically power-hungry PNAC ideologue spreading the gospel of Iraqi freedom, but I will sum it up by pointing out his byline: he is the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and should be more concerned about American freedoms than the Iraqis'. When the bureaucracy in which he "works" advocates prosecuting journalists who publish stories of the administration's illegal activities, something is dramatically wrong, and Don should worry a little more about the freedom of our American press.
Best,
---me---
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