Bill O'Reilly excuses child abuse

We've known for a long time that the worst Abu Ghraib photos remain unseen. Seymour Hersh has described videos involving horrific child abuse:

The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.

This quote comes from a speech given by Hersh during an ACLU function. For the past two years, the ACLU has sought the release of the still-censored material.

Murdochian blowhard Bill O'Reilly has come down in favor of continuing the policy of censorship, on the grounds that releasing photographic proof would result in the retaliatory killing of American soldiers. Needless to say, this all-purpose excuse can justify an infinitude of cover-ups. If exposure of crime becomes impossible, then crime will go unchecked -- just as robberies would increase at any convenience store that got rid of its surveillance cameras.

To buttress their pro-child-abuse stance, conservatives point to the mythic relationship between the Newsweek Koran-in-the-toilet tale and deadly riots in Afghanistan. "Mythic," because we now know from many sources that puerile abuse of the Islamic holy book has occurred, and that the cause of the riots had much more to do with the insensitive behavior of the American military toward the Afghan populace.

By O'Reilly's logic, any criticism of this administration's policies or of the military's conduct is tantamount to treason. He tells his audience that only people who "hate America" want the truth.

To love America is to love the lie. So sayeth Bill.

A few observations:

1. Any number of right-wing websites, particularly those catering to fundamentalists, feature rhetoric and imagery which Muslims might well find offensive. Offense could lead to violent reaction. If O'Reilly is to be consistent, he should call for censorship in such cases as well.

2. As Al Franken pointed out, suicide bombers in Iraq may also have taken offense at the images -- widely seen in the Murdoch press -- of Saddam Hussein in his underwear.

3. When Clinton took action against Milosevic, neither O'Reilly nor any other right-wing propagandist called for a moratorium on rhetoric or revelation embarrassing to the administration.

4. Nothing justifies protecting the guilty at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

5. The Iraqis know full well what is going on; the only people O'Reilly hopes to keep in the dark are the Americans. Exposing crimes does not cause retaliatory violence; committing crimes does.

6. The insurgents are motivated, first and foremost, by the fact that an Islamic country remains under the rule of an occupying force, a force alien to their culture. Both the insurgents and the "friendly" Iraqis know that Bush invaded Iraq to steal oil, not to topple a dictator. If our objective were to spread democracy, we would topple Uzbekistan instead of allying ourselves to that bloody regime.