The media always seems to have a phobia on one or two stories that they cover almost daily until the public either grows tired of reading or in the opinion of the editors, the story has lost its importance as a “cause celebre”. The Abu Ghraib story was highlighted by the N.Y. Times for over 20 consecutive daily editions. The Abu Ghraib incident was nothing to be proud of by the military but it was eventually cleared up and military justice was metted out to those responsible for the outrages. The continued pounding by the press certainly did nothing to help our efforts in Iraq by those dedicated service men and women who are still doing an heroic job. I feel that much of the coverage by the press was just anti-Bush rhetoric, since the American press by and large has been against the war from the start.

      The current overworked news item concerns the Patriot Act and its extension. Now the “buzz word” is Civil Rights and the violation thereof. It would be interesting to determine that if we had had a Patriot type of legislation on the books prior to 9/11, could that disaster have been prevented, by strong anti terror type of surveillance? The liberal press is now attacking on a daily basis incidents that show how someone’s Civil rights have been compromised without adding that perhaps some inconvenience on the part of the public might be justified if another 9/11 type episode might be stopped by a certain amount of over- zealous observation of potential terror possibilities. If, for example, this country would suffer another domestic terror attack, I wonder if the Democrats and the liberal press would then ask this question: Why were we not prepared to stop this attack and what were the CIA and the NSA doing when we have already suffered through one major disaster costing over 3,000 lives?

      On the subject of American past wars, one only must read history to know about the dissension at the time of the Revolutionary war, directed at John Adams and Washington. The Civil war saw tremendous anti-Lincoln rhetoric and suspension of many civil rights at that time. "The Korean war, after the initial North Korean advance, saw protests against what was conceived as an unnecessary war, particularly when this was represented as being due to the intemperate policies of the great non-European powers who neither understood nor cared for the survival of western Europe and its values.” (Britannica Book of the Year, 1951) The Viet Nam war was lost by the incessant poor reporting of what was happening, culminating in the erroneous coverage of the Tet offensive prior to our evacuation. In my opinion, wars are terrible events and a last resort to settle problems, but in some circumstances when we are attacked on our own soil, e.g. WW II and 9/11, we have no choice but to fight back. In the case of 9/11, had President Clinton taken more action after the first World Trade Center attack, we might have been spared that disaster if instead of treating the perpetrators as criminals they would have been prosecuted as terrorists and agencies could have worked together instead of having to contend with the “wall.”

Gary E. Marsella

Return to Home Page