albionmoonlight
02-16-2006, 06:43 AM
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/02/16/abughraib.photos/index.html
For those that don't know, a newspaper recently released more photos of the prisioner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The above article focuses on the United States Defense Department's reaction to the photos, which is that they should not have been released because they "could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world."
Now, there are certainly catagories of "news" that should, in my mind, be supressed in the name of national security. Current troop locations, etc. Information whose strategic value to us in a temporary sense would be lost if it were made public--and whose value to the world is, at best, minimal.
However, if you were to take the core of my political belief system--the axis around which it is based--the idea that information should be supressed because it might upset some people would come durn close to the polar opposite of that core.
Every time we supress information because we don't think that people can handle it--or because we don't want to deal with their reactions when they do handle it--we go down a dangerous road. Sunshine is still the best killer of corruption. Roaches like the dark.
(And, as I was writing this, I also remember the recent flap over the Danish cartoons. Leaving aside the fact that most of those cartoons are, as one reporter put it, more incomprehensible than a Cathy strip, they should of course have been published by Western newspapers. If not immediately, then after the flap over them became a headline story for three days.)
Knowing this board, however, I bet I get some pretty strong and well thought out disagreement on this point.
For those that don't know, a newspaper recently released more photos of the prisioner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The above article focuses on the United States Defense Department's reaction to the photos, which is that they should not have been released because they "could only further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world."
Now, there are certainly catagories of "news" that should, in my mind, be supressed in the name of national security. Current troop locations, etc. Information whose strategic value to us in a temporary sense would be lost if it were made public--and whose value to the world is, at best, minimal.
However, if you were to take the core of my political belief system--the axis around which it is based--the idea that information should be supressed because it might upset some people would come durn close to the polar opposite of that core.
Every time we supress information because we don't think that people can handle it--or because we don't want to deal with their reactions when they do handle it--we go down a dangerous road. Sunshine is still the best killer of corruption. Roaches like the dark.
(And, as I was writing this, I also remember the recent flap over the Danish cartoons. Leaving aside the fact that most of those cartoons are, as one reporter put it, more incomprehensible than a Cathy strip, they should of course have been published by Western newspapers. If not immediately, then after the flap over them became a headline story for three days.)
Knowing this board, however, I bet I get some pretty strong and well thought out disagreement on this point.