Turning the Tide: Rwanda and Abu Ghraib May 10, 2004

The past month was the 10th anniversary of the massacres in Rwanda, and there was much soul-searching about our failure to do anything about them. So headlines read “To Say `Never Again’ and Mean it; the 1994 Rwandan genocide should have taught us about the consequences of doing nothing” (Richard Holbrooke, Washington Post); “Learn from Rwanda” (Bill Clinton, Washington Post). So what did we learn?

In Rwanda, for 100 days people were being killed at the rate of about 8000 a day, and we did nothing. Fast forward to today. In Africa, about 10,000 children a day are dying from easily treatable diseases, and we are doing nothing to save them. That’s not just 100 days, it’s every day, year after year, killing at the Rwanda rate. And far easier to stop then Rwanda: it just means pennies to bribe drug companies to produce remedies. But we do nothing.

Which raises another question: what kind of socioeconomic system can be so savage and insane that to stop Rwanda-scale killings among children going on year after year it’s necessary to bribe the most profitable industry that ever existed? That’s carrying socioeconomic lunacy beyond the bounds that even the craziest maniac could imagine? But we do nothing.

So what was learned from Rwanda. And why isn’t it a story? I think the reason is clear. It’s too hard to look into the mirror. In the case of Abu Ghraib, we can say someone else is responsible.

Posted by Noam Chomsky at May 10, 2004 09:42 AM

stephanie sinclair (photos)

Read the CNN interview of Koppel

COOPER: Let me ask you, how much of your decision was — to do this was based on your own experience as being embedded during the war?

KOPPEL: I wouldn’t focus it on that. Over the course of the past 41 years, I’ve covered about 11 wars, or 12 wars, beginning in 1967 in Vietnam.

And if there’s one thing I’ve come to feel very strongly is that we have a responsibility in our business to keep reminding people of the cost of war.

You may recall when I was embedded, Charlie Gibson and I got engaged in a friendly debate on “Good Morning America” one day on whether or not to show the pictures of wounded and dead. And while I agree that you don’t show their faces, you don’t, in other words, inform the families on live television that their loved ones have been injured or killed, nevertheless I feel it’s very important that we do show the consequences of war.

And not to do that is to airbrush it to such a degree that people may get too fond of war.

Its only going to get much much worse: “Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”

Can you believe this????