I cannot believe this made onto their site:
http://www.cnn.com/...
Most, hopefully all of us who have never served, can find compassion for those who do. War is more than hell these days, it is a game entered into by men who have either never served, or never had to enter into combat.
For these non-combatant (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice, Feith...the list goes on) ideology seems to trump moderation and even decency in almost all cases.
The massacre of innocent civilians, even in the heat of battle, is one thing. To have network personnel act as apologists for it, is another.
Arwa Damon's "Behind The Scenes" piece is precisely what the Pentagon had in mind when it embedded reporters. Not only does the piece lack objectivity, it goes the other way. It attempts to create sympathy for those Marines who massacred innocent people
apparently in retaliation for the loss of one of their men.
First, objectivity is an invention of journalism profs - it is the ideal to which journalists should aspire, but bias creeps in all the time. One cannot observe war and be objective. One can do the best to report on the facts and hope that, in the telling, the audience can learn something about the horrors of war.
Second, military personnel forge bonds that are stronger and more life-preserving than most of us will ever, ever have to know. I do believe that we owe them all more than we can ever repay. These men and women lose more than a colleague in battle; they lose a piece of themselves when one of their own goes down.
But there is no moral justification for the slaughter of innocents. Beyond understanding how a unit works, and beyond questions of journalistic objectivity, there must be a bright line that we can not cross. The massacre of Haditha is an example of one such bright line, crossed in horrific way.
Arwa Damon and CNN should know better. There is the darkness in the soul that each of these men will face, and that will be a punishment that none of us would wish upon our worst enemy. But for Damon and CNN to create such a folksy, sympathetic portrait of such an act is not only crappy journalism, it is manipulative and immoral.
And if I want that, I can watch Fox. Somebody, please, explain how this story, and the last few months of soft-pedaling on Iraq, corruption and administration, happened.