Saving Private England

by Frank Rich

The New York Times - Published: May 16, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/arts/16RICH.html?th

It’s almost too perfect. Two young working-class women
from opposite ends of West Virginia go off to war. One
is blond and has aspirations to be a schoolteacher. The
other is dark, a smoker, divorced and now carrying an
out-of-wedlock baby. One becomes the heroic poster
child for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the subject of a
hagiographic book and TV movie; the other becomes the
hideous, leering face of American wartime criminality,
Exhibit A in the indictment of our country’s descent
into the gulag. In the words of Time magazine, Pfc.
Lynndie England is "a Jessica Lynch gone wrong."

Maybe that’s true - we are just starting to hear
Private England speak for herself - but there’s a more
revealing story in these women than the cheap ironies
of their good witch/wicked witch twinship might
suggest. Our 13-month journey from Jessica Lynch’s
profile in courage to Lynndie England’s profile in
sadism is less the tale of two women at the bottom of
the chain of command than a gauge of the hubris by
which those at the top have lost the war in both the
international and American courts of public opinion.
And the supposedly uplifting Lynch half of the double
bill is as revealing of what’s gone wrong for us in
Iraq - and gone wrong from the start - as is her
doppelgänger’s denouement at Abu Ghraib.

Flash back for a moment to the creation of Jessica
Lynch Superstar. It was in early April 2003 that the
stories first surfaced about the female Rambo who had
shot her way out of an ambush." She Was Fighting to the Death' " read the headline in The Washington Post, an account that was then regurgitated without question by much of the press. Later we learned that this story was almost entirely fiction, from the heroine's gunplay to the reports of her being slapped around by her Iraqi captors to the breathless cliffhanger of her rescue. Meanwhile, Jessica Lynch herself, unable to speak, was reduced to a mere pawn, an innocent bystander to her own big-budget biopic. When she emerged six months later, Diane Sawyer asked if it bothered her that she had been showcased by the military. "Yeah, it does," she answered. "It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong." This wrong was not committed by accident but by design. In the revelatory new documentary about Al Jazeera, "Control Room," opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, we are taken into our own Central Command's media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action. The Lynch episode came at a troubling moment in the war; our troops were being stretched thin, the coalition had mistakenly shot up a van full of Iraqi women and children, and three Marines had just been killed in the latest helicopter crash. But as we see in "Control Room," the CentCom press operation was determined to drown out such bad news by disseminating the triumphant prepackaged saga of its manufactured heroine no matter what. The documentary captures some of the briefing at which the dramatic Lynch story was first laid out. An American journalist on hand, the veteran CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, grumbles afterward about how the "minute-by-minute" account of the rescue has superseded the major news he and his colleagues had been waiting for: the fate of troops just entering Baghdad. His cavils were useless, however; the instant legend was moving too fast to be derailed. Soon the military would buttress it with a complementary video, shot and edited by its own movie crew: an action-packed montage of the guns-blazing Special Operations rescue raid, bathed in the iridescent "Matrix"-green glow of night-vision photography. But the marketing of this Jerry Bruckheimer-style video was itself an exercise in hype, meant to blur and inflate the Lynch episode further. The director of "Control Room" is Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian-American who is a protégé of D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, the chroniclers of the '92 Clinton campaign in "The War Room." Though Ms. Noujaim's principal subject may be the Arab satellite news station that has been widely condemned as a fount of anti-American propaganda, her eye for the American media is no less keen. The true control room in "Control Room" is not so much the Al Jazeera HQ as the coalition media center. It is there, from a costly Hollywood set, that the military commanded its own propaganda effort, which was aided and abetted by an American press sometimes as eager to slant the news as its Arab counterpart. The attractively forthright American press officer we follow throughout the documentary, Lt. Josh Rushing of the Marines, doesn't deny the symmetry: "When I watch Al Jazeera, I can tell what they are showing and then I can tell what they are not showing - by choice. Same thing when I watch Fox on the other end of the spectrum." Revisiting the invasion of Iraq again in "Control Room," we can see how much the Bush administration was seduced into complacency early on, not just by the relative ease with which it took Iraq but by its success at news management. The Lynch triumph was followed within days by the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue (which looks more like a staged event than a spontaneous Iraqi outpouring when Ms. Noujaim shows it in wide-angle shots). Next up was "Top Gun." Yet we were very good at feigning ignorance about our own propaganda while decrying Al Jazeera's fictionalizations. In one particularly embarrassing illustration of American hypocrisy, we're reminded of how Donald Rumsfeld berated the Arab channel for violating the Geneva Convention by broadcasting pictures of American prisoners of war. By the time of his outburst - March 2003 - we were very likely already violating the Geneva Convention ourselves. The confidential Red Cross report uncovered this week by The Wall Street Journal reveals that complaints about our abuse of Iraqi prisoners had already started by then, some 10 months before the Pentagon launched the Taguba investigation. In retrospect, much of what we saw during Operation Iraqi Freedom was as fictionalized as CentCom's version of "Saving Private Jessica." When we weren't staging the news, we were covering it up. "A war with hundreds of coalition and tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties" was transformed "into something closer to a defense contractor's training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically ceased to exist." That was the conclusion reached by one of the leaders of a research project at George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs, which examined 600 hours of war coverage on CNN, Fox and ABC from the war's March 20, 2003, start to the April 9 fall of Baghdad, "to see howreal’ the war looked on TV." Of
the 1,710 stories they surveyed, "only 13.5 percent
included any shots of dead or wounded coalition
soldiers, Iraqi soldiers or civilians."

That brief war, since renamed "major combat
operations," seems like a century ago. As "Saving
Private Jessica" symbolizes how effectively the
military and administration controlled the news during
Operation Iraqi Freedom, so the photos of Lynndie
England and her cohort symbolize their utter loss of
that control now. More scoops are on the way, and not
just those of torture. "Everybody wants to cut to the
chase, but the movie has just started," a top
Republican aide told The New York Times this week. We
are only beginning to learn, for instance, about the
shadowy roles played by America’s most sizable ally in
"the coalition of the willing" - not the British, with
some 9,000 troops, but the mercenaries, whose duties
and ranks (now at some 20,000) have crept up largely
out of our view.

It has taken a while for Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard
Myers to figure out just how much their power to
enforce their own narrative of this war has waned.
Their many successes in news management have been their
undoing, leaving them besotted by their own
invincibility and ill-equipped for failure. Clearly
they still believed they could control the pictures.
According to Mr. Rumsfeld’s own congressional
testimony, he was "surprised" that lowly enlisted men
could be "running around with digital cameras" e-
mailing grotesque Kodak snapshots all over the world.
Even after making that discovery, such was his and
General Myers’s habitual arrogance that they didn’t
bother to get ahead of the Abu Ghraib story - or to
familiarize themselves with its particulars - once CBS
gave them a full two weeks of head’s up before "60
Minutes II" broadcast it to the world. Or maybe they
just hoped that the press’s wartime self-censorship
would continue. After all, in happier times, Larry
Flynt had done the patriotic thing by refusing to
publish half-nude snapshots of Jessica Lynch that fell
into his hands at the time of her greatest celebrity.

In desperation, some torture apologists are trying to
concoct the fictions the administration used to ply so
well. Rush Limbaugh has been especially creative. The
photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib "look like standard
good old American pornography," he said as the story
spread, as if he might grandfather wartime atrocities
into an entertainment industry that, however deplorable
to Islam, has more fans in our Christian country than
Major League Baseball. In Mr. Limbaugh’s view, the
guards humiliating the Iraqis were just "having a good
time" and their pictures look "just like anything you’d
see Madonna or Britney Spears do onstage . . . I mean,
this is something that you can see onstage at Lincoln
Center from an N.E.A. grant, maybe on `Sex and the City
. . .’ "

But this movie has just started, and it’s beyond
anyone’s power to spin it any longer. Yet when the
president traveled to the Pentagon on Monday to look at
previews of the coming attractions, he seemed as out of
touch with reality as Mr. Limbaugh. It was nothing if
not an odd moment to congratulate the secretary of
defense, who has literally thrown the reputation of our
honorable military and our country to the dogs, for
doing a "superb job." But to understand where Mr. Bush
is coming from, one need only recall the interview he
gave last fall to Brit Hume of Fox News, in which he
griped about the press ("the filter," as he calls it)
that was now challenging administration propaganda from
Iraq. "The best way to get the news is from objective
sources," the president said back then, "and the most
objective sources I have are people on my staff who
tell me what’s happening in the world." Perhaps someone
on that staff might tell him that, according to the
latest polls, most of the country has changed the
channel.