Philip Weiss, who writes the MondoWeiss blog at The New York Observer questions the morality of an NBC story about a group of orphaned girls in Iraq whose parents died because of what he describes as the "war we started."
Last night Brian Williams said that the network had been overwhelmed by emails and calls about the story. The network then did something great: it reaired the story.
You will see that it has top billing on the NBC website. Here the headline is "How to Help Iraq's Orphans." NBC then suggests that viewers give money to Unicef, No More Victims, and two other nonprofit groups.
He then goes on to point out that NBC is reaping great exposure and profits from the plight of those poor girls by putting them in grave danger of being executed by the insurgents.
And you have to ask, what planet do these journalists live on? Anyone who reads Juan Cole, which is anyone who wants to know what's going on in Iraq, knows that to publish information about American good deeds is to sign a death warrant for those we help. And this knowledge is not limited to Cole's readers, the mainstream media report it regularly as well.
And what a coup it would be for the Iraqi insurgency, or Al-Qaeda to murder these poor orphans who have come to the attention of so many good, decent Americans because of NBC's irresponsible pursuit of ratings.
Colonel Kurtz described the situation so well:
I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried...I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that.
Well, the Kurtz character wasn't written as sane, and those who kill children are not filled with love, but they do have the will to win, unless we have the will to exterminate them, taking out the innocent along with the guilty.
But as Willard points out, that strategy is insane. NBC, however, is not insane. They are merely incompetent. And if those little children die for their incompetence, may those suits on the upper west side and in D.C. suffer the tortures of the damned.
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