Before Americans took control of Abu Ghraib after invading Iraq, Saddam Hussein had used the prison to torture and murder political detainees. Reports say as many as 4,000 murders were committed there. There are numerous accounts of prisoners being found with missing limbs, limbs that were perhaps fed to one of the Ba’athist regime’s industrial-strength wood-chippers. But no one knew the name Abu Ghraib until 2004 when images surfaced of American troops sexually humiliating detainees at the prison.

Then, a media frenzy.

Round the clock coverage; thirty straight days of front page ink in the New York Times; The Economist, the Boston Globe, the Times, and others called for then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. As Peter Schweizer pointed out Monday, Harry Smith claimed on CBS that what happened at Abu Ghraib was a logical consequence of Bush’s policies. The images became the calling card of the national and international anti-war movement. The abuse was referenced in hit T.V. shows Family Guy and Arrested Development, among others. World-renowned artist Fernando Botero even toured the world with an exhibit of dozens upon dozens of his signature “volumetric” paintings (that means depicting morbidly obese people and animals) embellishing the cruelty that took place at the hands of American servicemen and women.

This week, Der Spiegel released photos of a similar incident. The Week sums it up well:

German news magazine Der Spiegel has published photographs of grinning American soldiers posing next to the corpse of an Afghan civilian. (See the graphic photos here.) The soldiers, Spec. Jeremy N. Morlock of Alaska and Pfc. Andrew H. Holmes of Idaho, are among five members of a rogue 5th Stryker Brigade “kill team” facing murder charges in the deaths of three Afghan civilians last year. Military commanders say they are bracing for an explosion of anti-U.S. anger akin to that which followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq. Is this as bad?

This is worse than Abu Ghraib: NATO leaders know these images “could be more damning than the photos from Abu Ghraib,” says Nitasha Tiku at New York. The photos from Iraq showed U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners, and that was bad enough. But these soldiers have been accused of “deliberately” murdering Afghan civilians. And these images might just be the tip of the iceberg — apparently, the Stryker “kill team” recorded their actions in 4,000 photos and videos.

So the Times itself, the paper who lead with the Abu Ghraib story without interruption for a full month, publishes a report that says these images are worse than Abu Ghraib. Yet, two days later, “Obama Ghraib” has already been bumped to page A20. But hey, who’s to say that article is more important than “Film Shows Babe Ruth, at Leisure and Up Close.” (more…)

As a filmmaker I have always entrusted the lens of a camera to illuminate both the stuff of my imagination and that of this world that otherwise would not be visible. This summer, I was tasked by Move America Forward – the largest pro-troop 501(c)3 in the country, which hosted the recent Troopathon that raised $541,711 for care packages for the troops – to travel to Iraq and capture a glimpse of the situation that may have ended up on the cutting room floors of the mainstream media.

My traveling companions were Matt Sanchez, a Move America Forward volunteer and producer of Fox News’ The Strategy Room; Mary Pearson, photographer; and Debbie Lee, the founder of America’s Mighty Warriors, a Gold Star mom whose son, Marc Allen Lee, was the first Navy-SEAL killed in Iraq during a fight in Ramadi on August 2, 2006.

In his last letter home, Marc had written:

What I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.

(more…)

Let’s face it. From the 2004 New York Yankees to that statue of Saddam Hussein, most of us get a kick out of seeing the mighty fall. And that’s essentially what’s happening to teachers’ unions all over this nation. For all the good they did when they were first formed 50 to 75 years ago, teachers’ unions have devolved into opponents of meaningful educational reform.

Teaching is steady work and in most states the pay is now about the same as a mid-level manager in business, but the profession requires substantially fewer days of work per year. And sure, there have been recent layoffs, but even in bad economic times, those who remain in the classroom manage to secure substantial raises and maintain their Cadillac health care plans while most of the rest of us in the private sector must beg our employers for a paltry increase and hope we don’t get sick. Still, good teachers themselves remain largely popular in their respective communities — and justifiably so.

So why are teachers’ unions losing clout? One big reason is that after decades of reflexive support, the news media are finally starting to turn against them. That’s right. Journalists and editors, many of whom belong to labor unions themselves, are finally waking up to the plain fact that taking courses and simply showing up to work every day — the standard measures that the unions demand in determining wages — are poor incentives to improve performance.

A story in yesterday’s Washington Post on the recent ratification of a new D.C. teachers contract, which calls for using student improvement as a measure of teacher evaluations, was as balanced a piece as you will ever see. In addition, the Post’s progressive editorial board has been remarkably supportive of D.C. school Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s plans to make it easier to remove chronically underperforming teachers from the classroom. Commendably, the Post’s editorial page has also been a proponent of nationwide school reform in general. (more…)

A new piece by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman will be largely ignored by the MSM because it doesn’t fit their Bush-Bashing template. Yesterday, Friedman wrote this in an op-ed column entitled “It’s Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck.”

Saddam’s Iraq was a temporary iron-fisted bulwark against Iranian expansion. But if Iraq has any sort of decent outcome — and becomes a real Shiite-majority, multiethnic democracy right next door to the phony Iranian version — it will be a source of permanent pressure on the Iranian regime. It will be a constant reminder that “Islamic democracy” — the rigged system the Iranians set up — is nonsense. Real “Islamic democracy” is just like any other democracy, except with Muslims voting.

Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right. It should have and could have been pursued with much better planning and execution. This war has been extraordinarily painful and costly. But democracy was never going to have a virgin birth in a place like Iraq, which has never known any such thing.

Yes, that appeared in the New York Times. (more…)