Those weapons of mass photography:Clarence Page

Those weapons of mass photography


By Clarence Page

May 13, 2004


http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.page13may13,0,7631101.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

WASHINGTON - If I had my way, every enlisted man and woman in the military would be issued a digital camera.


Take, for example, the contempt that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld showed for the cameras during recent hearings on Capitol Hill. His response to Sen. Susan M. Collins, a Maine Republican, turned into a bit of a rant: "We're functioning in a - with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the Information Age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."

No, folks, it is apparently not the Bush administration's gross lack of preparation for the management of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq that is the problem, in Rummy's view. It's those pesky soldiers and their weapons of mass photography.

Yet something rings a little hollow about Mr. Rumsfeld's complaint. While he complained that the prisoner abuse photos arrived in the hands of the media before they arrived at the Pentagon, the Pentagon sat on a prisoner abuse report without telling Congress or President Bush for two months.

or watch the news anymore.

Do you think that could be part of the problem?

He is in Iraq today blaming the media for the mess. I guess we are only suppose to see "the pretty side" of war.

is all about control of information. Carefully staged "leaks", spinning every comment, flanking the weekend news shows, and making sure that no information passes to the public without their approval and spin, or it doesn't pass to the public. So, digital cameras are really pissing him off . . . good! Just wait until they get around to the tell-all Iraq memoires that are sure to be published just like much of the autobiographical post Vietnam literature. He will positively crap himself.