the writer is former executive editor of the NYTimes. http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/g...Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2004/05/18&ID=Ar00903 -- There has been no end, no sign of ending.Decade after decade,century upon century, the leaders of all the Muslim states and their followers in the rest of the world have cried out “get it all out, all people must know.” It always has been something evil concocted by Jews that the world was supposed to know, right away.Always there was the objective.The objective, of course, was wearily familiar — the death of Israel. Now “get it out” means plastering the world with every picture or alleged picture showing American soldiers stripping and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners. Throughout the world, among friends of America, there is embarrassment to the bone. The embarrassed includes people whose parents and grandparents were victims of Saddam Hussein’s unending slaughter. I do not know if the Iraqis regularly used leashes on prisoners. But they did use poison gas on civilians they wanted to eliminate, like the Kurds. Strangely, we are uneasy even at the very idea of bringing up the mass Iraqi torture and murder.That is an insult to all those murdered masses of Iraqis, Kuwaitis, Jews, and Iranians. It is essential that we remember, ourselves, and the young members of the American armed forces know that they are fighting a government that is fascist in organization and in its slavering sadism. To remember the sufferings of Saddam’s victims is not to diminish the interest in the Iraqis tortured by the Americans. Saddam slaughtered his victims for two reasons: One is that he was afraid of his own people; the other is that it gave him pleasure to kill. Far more than almost any incident in the American-Iraqi war, including the horrifying beheading of an American civilian, Nicholas Berg, the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison dramatically emphasizes the role and power of the American press. There is now hardly a half hour that goes by without television asking if the American press has been doing a good job covering the “torture story.” I would answer, yes, when the newspapers and the networks are telling the news — not when they turn their microphones into pulpits. The other day, an editor of Editor & Publisher, a trade paper, said all American journalists should come out in unity and demand the American withdrawal from Iraq. The planned unity of newspapers, television, and magazines is not my idea of good journalism — or journalism at all. The quality of journalism on a particularly big story depends on how much or how little space and display the editor or publisher gives to the story. Readers should realize that the positioning of the story and the space allotted to it day after day tell you what the editors and publishers think about its importance, far more than the talent and bravery of the reporter. _The editors and other executives who make these decisions should live with their judgments, and will. In the years before World War II, officials of the New York Times shamed the paper by squeezing stories about millions of Europeans suffering and dying in the Nazi concentration camps, into meager and insufficient space. Years later,the paper tried to find out exactly who made those decisions. It could not, but it published an apology from its heart. Since the latest torture story, many editors have failed to present background stories about the millions killed by Saddam. They worry about being accused of minimizing the brutalization of Iraqi prisoners by Americans, if they recall in print the masses of people Saddam slaughtered. These journalists are truly embarrassing. They insult all these victims. We should throw roses on their graves. That should not be allowed to weaken our coverage of the horrendous abuse that took place in Abu Ghraib prison.
