NBC Relays View of Rumsfeld as "Neo-Nazi," and Raises Mein Kampf --5/11/2004

1. NBC Relays View of Rumsfeld as "Neo-Nazi," and Raises Mein Kampf
The broadcast and cable network newscasts led once again Monday night with multiple stories on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and calls for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to resign as all touted how the International Committee of the Red Cross reports from last year prove the abuse was widespread, not corrected and long-known by top officials. NBC went so far as to air a claim that Rumsfeld reminds one Egyptian journalist of a "neo-Nazi character" and how an Arab businessman thinks U.S. treatment of prisoners "is not Jeffersonian democracy. It's more like a lesson from Hitler's book, Mein Kampf."

2. ABC's Charles Gibson Forces Laura Bush to Discuss Prison Abuse
First Lady Laura Bush agreed to a live interview on Monday's Good Morning America so she could promote her announcement of the 2004 grant recipients from her Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries, but ABC's Charles Gibson focused on the prison abuse scandal and her husband's view of it. Gibson wanted to know: "But does it put our entire effort, given the way it's being played over there, does it put our entire effort -- everything we've done -- in jeopardy?" When he got to education, his concern was about how the No Child Left Behind program is supposedly "under-funded."

3. "Pictures Shred the Last Good Reason to Feel Righteous" on War
Time and Newsweek put the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal on their covers this week as pieces inside the magazines denounced how the Bush administration has conducted the war and turned the world against us and they blamed the abuse on the Rumsfeld-authorized notion that in a war on terrorists the Geneva Conventions cannot always be followed. Time's Nancy Gibbs, after pointing out how human rights became the reason for the war after WMD were not found, declared: "Psychologically, if not in fact, these pictures shred the last good reason to feel righteous about having gone to war." In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, a regular on ABC's This Week, ridiculed President Bush's promise to usher in a "new responsibility era" as he concluded, "Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility."

NBC Relays View of Rumsfeld as "Neo-Nazi,"
and Raises Mein Kampf

The broadcast and cable network newscasts led once again Monday night with multiple stories on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and calls for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to resign as all touted how the International Committee of the Red Cross reports from last year prove the abuse was widespread, not corrected and long-known by top officials. NBC went so far as to air a claim that Rumsfeld reminds one Egyptian journalist of a "neo-Nazi character" and how an Arab businessman thinks U.S. treatment of prisoners "is not Jeffersonian democracy. It's more like a lesson from Hitler's book, Mein Kampf."

CBS's Dan Rather began his May 10 broadcast by trumpeting: "Leading military newspapers today came out calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's removal, accusing him of, and I quote, 'failure that amounts to professional negligence.'" Peter Jennings teased ABC's World News Tonight: "The International Red Cross says the Bush administration knew about allegations of torture and humiliation in Iraqi prisons more than a year ago." NBC's Tom Brokaw echoed that theme: "A Confidential report suggests the U.S. knew abuse was standing operating procedure in Iraqi prisons and did nothing to stop it." Brokaw promised: "The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is a long way from over."

Andrea Mitchell pointed out how the Red Cross found that the U.S. employed "physical and psychological coercion" despite, she bore in, "George Bush's promise last year that Iraqi prisoners would be treated properly as he expected Americans to be treated."

From Egypt, NBC's Fred Francis found everyone the world over says that Rumsfeld must go. Before quoting an Arab businessman who analogized U.S. behavior to Mein Kampf, Francis cited a woman he described as "a moderate journalist" and highlighted a clip of her charging of Rumsfeld: "He is reminding me of a sort of neo-Nazi character who's coming back to life and anything which is not American is wrong."

CNN's NewsNight with Aaron Brown devoted about half the show to the scandal, but Brown did bring aboard, via satellite from Washington, DC, National Review Online Editor-at-Large Jonah Goldberg who argued that, given the danger the pictures posed to troop safety and that there was no reason to believe that the abuse was ongoing, CBS and the New Yorker should not have shown the pictures. And now, no additional photos should be released. He contended:
"There is very little evidence that this was reporting actual news. This story was out. The New York Times, CNN had reported on this already. Another standard would be, would releasing the pictures stop abuse that is actually going on at the moment? And, again, there is no evidence that I have seen that that is the case. This in many respects was purely sensational. And on Friday night, I know that you mentioned that, you know, that pictures increase our understanding of things. And I think that's often the case. But we don't use that as a standard to show pictures all the time. For example, one of the most raging national debates now is partial-birth abortion. I've never seen a partial-birth abortion live on television before, and for a pretty good reason.
"We stopped seeing the pictures from 9/11 of Americans jumping off of the World Trade Centers. Within 48 hours, the major news networks in this country decided to stop showing it because they decided it was too disturbing. I saw so much context after 9/11 from Peter Jennings, especially, when Palestinians were celebrating in the streets after the 9/11 attack, and Peter Jennings went out of his way to call these isolated incidents, don't make a big deal out of it.
"We got nothing like that from the media. We got full feeding frenzy with these pictures. And I think that the point is if -- there is real damage. And I'm just sort of shocked that I'm the only person who thinks this is a legitimate point to debate right now."

For Goldberg's May 7 National Review Online column expounding on his viewpoint, see: www.nationalreview.com

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann opened his Countdown show by ridiculing President Bush's insistence that Rumsfeld is doing a "superb job" and asked: "If the buck does not stop with Mr. Rumsfeld, where does it?" Olbermann announced, as taken down by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth:
"Good evening. For the second time in three business days, the President of the United States has given his Secretary of Defense a public vote of confidence. In business or in sports, that would be the proverbial lead pipe cinch that the guy would be fired within 72 hours. But George Bush was not a typical businessman, not a typical sports owner, and he certainly has not been a typical President. Our fifth story on the Countdown tonight, what the President calls Rumsfeld's 'superb job.' Considering the statement was made on a day when more stark photographs emerged from Abu Ghraib prison, and the military tried to figure out how best to release those worst ones yet to come, the real question might be, 'If the buck does not stop with Mr. Rumsfeld, where does it?'"

To give you a flavor of the media's agenda, a brief rundown of the May 10 show introductions and subsequent story topics on the broadcast network evening shows:

-- ABC's World News Tonight. Jennings teased: "The International Red Cross says the Bush administration knew about allegations of torture and humiliation in Iraqi prisons more than a year ago."

Jennings opened his show: "Good evening. Two American soldiers were killed in Iraq today. The war goes on. And so, at a much lower level than a month ago, do the U.S. efforts to get Iraq ready for political self-determination at the end of June. The President made a speech at the Pentagon today about the war effort and why, in his view, the U.S. will prevail. But so much of this here and there is still overshadowed by the reports of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis in prison. The President again today tried to limit the damage, but it is very difficult."

After Terry Moran at the White House on Bush's trip to the Pentagon, Jennings intoned: "A report from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was first seen in the Wall Street Journal today, provides a dramatic indictment of the process by which allegations of prisoner abuse were handled. According to the ICRC, the Bush administration knew about the abuses long before they were investigated. And the Red Cross says they were an acceptable practice."

Martha Raddatz filled in the details, including how coalition intelligence officers estimated that up to 90 percent of those arrested were a mistake.

Finally, Kate Snow retraced the abuses at Abu Ghraib and how they occurred after it became over-crowded, Major General Geoffrey Miller allowed MPs to soften up prisoners and the 372nd MP Company, which was tired and expected to return to the U.S., was assigned to the prison guard duty.

-- CBS Evening News. Dan Rather teased: "Tonight, new evidence Iraqi prisoner abuse was not isolated, but was possibly widespread."

Rather opened his show: "Good evening. Leading military newspapers today came out calling for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's removal. Accusing him of, and I quote, 'failure that amounts to professional negligence.' This comes among new indications that abuse of Iraqi prisoners may not have been limited to a few cases, and possibly started much earlier than U.S. officials have said. President Bush is standing by Rumsfeld. The President today saw for himself unreleased images of Iraqi prisoners being abused by some American soldiers, images soon to be seen by Congress. CBS's John Roberts reports, one way or another, the public might soon see the pictures the President saw today. We caution you, you may not want your young children to hear the graphic descriptions in John's report."

John Roberts relayed how the unreleased video and pictures are "of prisoners naked, being forced to masturbate before the camera and pornographic video of sex between two guards."

Roberts highlighted how "the influential Military Times Group wrote today the Pentagon is deriding 'the six morons who lost the war.' But they are focused on 'the wrong morons. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential, even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.'"

Next, David Martin looked at why Rumsfeld's job is in danger and how there are predictions the scandal will not end until there are high level resignations.

Mark Phillips then detailed how the International Committee of the Red Cross reports raised warnings much before January as last year they documented a "pattern of brutal behavior."

-- NBC Nightly News. Tom Brokaw teased: "Early warnings: A Confidential report suggests the U.S. knew abuse was standing operating procedure in Iraqi prisons and did nothing to stop it."

Brokaw led his program: "Good evening. The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is a long way from over. In fact, the worst pictures of grotesque mistreatment have yet to be seen by Congress and the public. But for now, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld stays in his job. For now. In Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike want many more answers than they have received so far. We're going to begin tonight with the President's vote of confidence in Rumsfeld in a highly-publicized trip to the Pentagon."

Jim Miklaszewski trumpeted how "despite today's vote of confidence from President Bush, there are surprising voices now calling for Rumsfeld's resignation. Conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote today that leading Republican lawmakers and contributors told him 'Rumsfeld had to go.'"

Brokaw set up the second story of the newscast: "And there's more evidence that high-ranking American political and military officials had repeated warning about the prisoner abuses from, among other places, the International Red Cross."

Andrea Mitchell brought it home to Bush as she reported how numerous ICRC reports went unheeded and then, "finally, in February the Red Cross issued this report to coalition leader Paul Bremer and General Rick Sanchez, warning that [text with ellipses on screen] 'physical and psychological coercion...appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures to...obtain confession and extract information' at Abu Ghraib. This despite George Bush's promise last year that Iraqi prisoners would be treated properly as he expected Americans to be treated."
Bush on White House driveway on way to or from helicopter, March 23, 2003: "The POWs I expect to be treated humanly and, just like we're treating the prisoners that we have captured humanly. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals."
Mitchell: "U.S. officials say the White House and Pentagon ignored repeated warnings from Paul Bremer and Colin Powell..."

Brokaw next announced: "As you would expect, all of this only fuels outrage toward the United States in the Arab world and beyond. And tonight the question, can anything be done to salvage the so-called battle for hearts and minds?"

From Egypt, Fred Francis declared: "In the Arab street and much of the world, outrage has produced a consensus: Rumsfeld must go. In Egypt Marabak Molson [spelling not on screen and so a phonetic guess], considered a moderate journalist [video of her anchoring a TV newscast], says Arabs reject the Rumsfeld apology that still seemed more arrogant than contrite."
Molson [sp?]: "He is reminding me of a sort of neo-Nazi character who's coming back to life and anything which is not American is wrong."
Francis: "In Cairo, anti-U.S. sentiment is so strong many here see no difference here between the actions of Saddam Hussein and George Bush..."

Moving on to Germany, Francis passed along this soundbite from Dr. Jurgen Falter of the University of Mainz: "There have to be total structural reform and total transparency in regard to the tortures and regard to what's going on in Iraq."
Francis added, as he walked through a Cairo marketplace: "Like the new prison picture from Iraq of attacking dogs, prompting one Arab businessman to say, 'that is not Jeffersonian democracy. It's more like a lesson from Hitler's book, Mein Kampf.' Many more Arabs here are saying the U.S. must quit Iraq..."

After a denouncement from a Russian, Francis did at least highlight an Italian professor who said that the U.S. dealing openly with the abuse shows how "democracy has enough courage to face it's own evil."

For a picture and bio of Fred Francis: msnbc.msn.com

Finally, after some unrelated stories, NBC ended the newscast with a story on the power of news photos. Brokaw maintained of the Abu Ghraib pictures: "Already they're an enduring symbol of a controversial war." Bob Faw recalled indelible images from Vietnam of the fleeing naked Vietnamese girl and the execution of the Vietnamese General, as well as how the civil rights movement gained support after photos of police dogs snarling at peaceful protesters in Birmingham. He also noted positive images, such as of Iwo Jima and the student standing in front of the tank in Tiennenman Square. Faw observed: "No, the prison photos are not as gruesome as torture inflicted by Saddam or the My Lai massacre by Americans soldiers, but in the Arab world and at home they are drawing blood, piercing hearts and changing minds."

ABC's Charles Gibson Forces Laura Bush
to Discuss Prison Abuse

First Lady Laura Bush agreed to a live interview on Monday's Good Morning America so she could promote her announcement of the 2004 grant recipients from her Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries, but ABC's Charles Gibson focused on the prison abuse scandal and her husband's view of it. Gibson wanted to know: "But does it put our entire effort, given the way it's being played over there, does it put our entire effort -- everything we've done -- in jeopardy?" When he got to education, his concern was about how the No Child Left Behind program is supposedly "under-funded."

The MRC's Jessica Anderson took down much of the back-and-forth between Gibson and Bush in the live, 7:30am half hour interview conducted in ABC's Time Square studio:

Gibson: "But as I mentioned, we are joined this morning by the First Lady, Laura Bush, who later this morning will head to a school in Queens, New York, to announce the 2004 Laura Bush Foundation for America's Libraries grant recipients....As I mentioned at the top of the half hour, this is a tough time."
Laura Bush: "Very tough."
Gibson: "And we often ask about your husband's private thoughts, but given these pictures as they come out, as I say, a very hard time I know for him, for us as a country."
Mrs. Bush: "For us as a country."
Gibson: "How anguished is he?...And so many people say, look, the vast, vast majority of our kids over there are good kids."
Mrs. Bush: "They are, they are."
Gibson: "Trying to do a good job to help the Iraqi society, but you wonder what this says about us as a society. We're only as strong as our weakest link? These are American kids in there doing this and it's what the Arab media plays incessantly over and over again....But Secretary Rumsfeld warned us on Friday that these pictures are going to get worse. Do you know how much?"
Mrs. Bush: "No, no, I don't know how much worse, and to be perfectly frank, I can't bear to look at the ones that have been in the newspaper."
Gibson: "Does the President know?"
Mrs. Bush: "He may know."
Gibson: "Has he seen them? Has he talked to you about them?"
Mrs. Bush: "No, he hasn't talked to me, he told me some things about them."
Gibson: "What did he say?"
Mrs. Bush, laughing: "I think I'll let, you know, see what happens if they come out. It's a terrible, terrible issue, but it is not a picture of the United States and the American people know that."
Gibson: "But does it put our entire effort, given the way it's being played over there, does it put our entire effort -- everything we've done -- in jeopardy?...We were talking, in the first half-hour we were talking about the fact that there were so many women in that prison involved in these actions."
Mrs. Bush: "It's shocking, I think. It's shocking to the Arab world, I'm sure, and I think it's shocking to people in the United States."
Gibson: "What's your reaction when you see it?...Let me turn to education. You have been a very outspoken supporter of No Child Left Behind, which is the President's main initiative in education, but you know it has come under sharp criticism, in many cases from teachers, that it's under-funded, that it's too rigid in the controls it puts on classrooms and that it relies too much on testing. Do changes need to be made in No Child Left Behind?"
"You have talked about the need to court teachers to keep them in the business, to make sure that teachers are better paid. I have a wife who is in education and I look at a lot of the chat rooms on the Internet, teachers talking to one another, and many of them cite No Child Left Behind as one of the reasons they're leaving teaching because it is so rigid and what it requires of them."
Only in his very last question did he get to the grants.

"Pictures Shred the Last Good Reason
to Feel Righteous" on War

Time and Newsweek put the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal on their covers this week as pieces inside the magazines denounced how the Bush administration has conducted the war and turned the world against us and they blamed the abuse on the Rumsfeld-authorized notion that in a war on terrorists the Geneva Conventions cannot always be followed. Time's Nancy Gibbs, after pointing out how human rights became the reason for the war after WMD were not found, declared: "Psychologically, if not in fact, these pictures shred the last good reason to feel righteous about having gone to war." In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, a regular on ABC's This Week, ridiculed President Bush's promise to usher in a "new responsibility era" as he concluded, "Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility."

The cover of the May 17 Newsweek featured a photo of Rumsfeld with the words "Is He to Blame?" The subhead on the side: "Rumsfeld and the Road to the Prison Abuse Scandal" See: msnbc.msn.com

"Iraq: How Did It Come to This?" read the title over Time's cover illustration which consisted of a painting of a hooded, naked Iraqi man, a scene inspired by one of the photos. See: www.time.com

An excerpt from Gibbs' piece in Time, "Their Humiliation, and Ours; The U.S. was forced to see itself as the world does -- and it was painful to behold."

....This "does not represent the America that I know," President Bush said of the events at Abu Ghraib, and how tempting it was to go there. The pictures can't be real. If they are real, they can't be typical. If they are typical, this can't be America -- unless, perhaps, you are Rush Limbaugh, who invited listeners to identify with the frustration the soldiers must have felt being shot at by the ungrateful Iraqi people; so naturally they felt the need to "blow some steam off," to "have a good time." Others noted that there was less outcry when Saddam was doing the torturing, or argued that "they would do the same to us" if they had a chance. When we are reduced to insisting that our depravity isn't as bad as the other guy's, we have fallen deep into a pit of moral equivalence that reveals what we have lost.

You could track the stages of grief, because something precious had surely died: a hope that the world might one day come to see Americans as we see ourselves. Instead, we have had to see ourselves as the world sees us. On the very site where Saddam drilled holes in prisoners' hands or dipped them in acid, the American guards, instead of planting new values, harvested the ones already there. I heard the pain last week of people who had supported the war out of principle, who continued to support it after weapons weren't found and soldiers kept getting killed and other nations pulled out, and did so because, as Brigadier General Kimmitt put it last week, "we came here to help." That meant at the very least ensuring that Abu Ghraib was no longer a torture chamber. Now the front page of a Baghdad paper shows the defiled prisoners and the caption: "This is the freedom and democracy that Bush promised us." Psychologically, if not in fact, these pictures shred the last good reason to feel righteous about having gone to war.

Denial was of little use because the pictures told the story in a universal language of domination. And the perps in the pictures were somehow familiar, the giddy weekend warriors under the command of the traveling window-blind salesman, the boy next door -- and the girl. This time women can't privately tell one another that if only we were in charge, we might all have a chance of getting along, because there she is, Private England, gloating, holding the leash....

What they did was give the jihadists a gift of incalculable value. Our enemies call the U.S. godless, depraved and corrupt, and now they have a p.r. weapon of mass destruction that they will use as another reason to kill any other infidels they can. That's why we look for powerful people to be punished, even out of proportion to their responsibility. Soldiers should not be the only ones expected to sacrifice for the safety of the country. This event requires, to use the military term, an asymmetrical response....

And as for the violation of American values, we must recalculate the cost of the post-9/11 instinct to change the rules we play by, detain whomever we need to, forget due process and forgo the Geneva Convention. If this is indeed a fight to the death, what is it we are fighting for, if not the values we seem so ready to sacrifice on the grounds that this is a different kind of war? There will be other causes and threats, and we will need not only the power to confront them but the moral authority as well.

END of Excerpt

For the piece by Gibbs in full in the May 17 Time magazine: www.time.com

"The Price of Arrogance" read the headline over Zakaria's Newsweek story. The subhead over the article by the Editor of Newsweek International: "In a war that could go on for decades, you cannot simply detain people indefinitely on the sole authority of the Secretary of Defense." An excerpt:

"America is ushering in a new responsibility era," says President Bush as part of his standard stump speech, "where each of us understands we're responsible for the decisions we make in life." When speaking about bad CEOs he's even clearer as to what it entails: "You're beginning to see the consequences of people making irresponsible decisions. They need to pay a price for their irresponsibility."

"I take full responsibility," said Donald Rumsfeld in his congressional testimony last week. But what does this mean? Secretary Rumsfeld hastened to add that he did not plan to resign and was not going to ask anyone else who might have been "responsible" to resign. As far as I can tell, taking responsibility these days means nothing more than saying the magic words "I take responsibility."

After the greatest terrorist attack against America, no one was asked to resign, and the White House didn't even want to launch a serious investigation into it....After the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, not one person was even reassigned. The only people who have been fired or cashiered in this administration are men like Gen. Eric Shinseki, Paul O'Neill and Larry Lindsey, who spoke inconvenient truths....

The events at Abu Ghraib are part of a larger breakdown in American policy over the past two years. And it has been perpetrated by a small number of people at the highest levels of government.

Since 9/11, a handful of officials at the top of the Defense Department and the vice president's office have commandeered American foreign and defense policy. In the name of fighting terror they have systematically weakened the traditional restraints that have made this country respected around the world. Alliances, international institutions, norms and ethical conventions have all been deemed expensive indulgences at a time of crisis.

Within weeks after September 11, senior officials at the Pentagon and the White House began the drive to maximize American freedom of action. They attacked specifically the Geneva Conventions, which govern behavior during wartime....

The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been "We're at war; all these niceties will have to wait." As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq-troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani-Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.

END of Excerpt

For Zakaria's rant in full: msnbc.msn.com

# Tim Russert is scheduled to appear tonight (Tuesday) on Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

-- Brent Baker