By Georgie Anne Geyer
… Dan Rather announced that he would leave the anchor chair in March…
Where were all the top men at CBS who, as with all the networks over the last 20 years, worked to downgrade serious news and to champion the competitive, ratings-driven stories such as the one Dan Rather pursued? Would it not have been more appropriate for them to resign?
And the still-nameless Marine in Fallujah? Perhaps I'm making excuses for him, but given the chaos of battle, it is not difficult to see how something like this could have happened. A man afraid, with terror all around him, a terrible decision he will remember and regret all his life! But -- would it not be more effective to put on trial Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams and all the other fanatic intellectual couch potatoes who sent that Marine out to fight an impossible war?
And, of course, the jailers in Abu Ghraib. Their behavior was execrable, but can one believe that, all up and down the lines of power, they were not influenced by the fact that their superiors, such as Don Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, had publicly announced they would not obey the Geneva Accords in much of the treatment of prisoners from Iraq and Afghanistan?
We take the guys or girls at the bottom, who are indeed responsible for their own actions, and punish them alone -- and think we've done something admirable. But we haven't; we've just left the whole system in place and made them sacrifices to throw to the crowd.
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