Torture, Abu Ghraib, and Tom Fox

Yesterday, NBC trotted out the Abu Ghraib prison photos again.

At Newsbusters, Scott Whitlock writes:

United States officials announced yesterday that the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq will be closing in a few months. This gave NBC yet another excuse to show a montage of the famous abuse photos. Mike Boettcher, appearing at 7:06AM EST on the March 10 edition of Today, described the planned closing this way:

Boettcher: "During Saddam Hussein's reign and later under U.S. occupation, Abu Ghraib became perhaps the world's most notorious prison. Photographs of prisoner abuse by American guards at Abu Ghraib sparked an international scandal." (Pictures of abused prisoners overlap Boettcher’s comments.)

So it was Saddam Hussein and the United States that made the prison notorious? A naked pyramid may be bad, but it’s not the same as brutal murder. Further, it should be pointed out that Today (and NBC in general) did not show the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. But Abu Ghraib prison photos seem to be displayed for almost any reason, as Newsbusters blogger Mark Finkelstein pointed out on November 2, 2005. Today aired one of the photos for a general story on secret prisons. Abu Ghraib closes this summer, hopefully that will be NBC’s last "opportunity" to show their favorite pictures.

I can't stand the way the mainstream media outlets drag out Abu Ghraib abuse photos every time they do a story that makes only a remote connection to the incident.

Even in this case, with the announcement that the U.S. will no longer be using the facility, NBC chose to show four of the infamous photos.

As Whitlock suggests, hopefully these lib outlets will finally drop it when Abu Ghraib closes. I think that may be too much to wish for. After all, they still refer to Dan Quayle and the "potatoe scandal" more than a decade later.

These libs will never let the Abu Ghraib incident go. Never. Those pictures are sure to keep showing up. NBC will probably find a way to work them into their Beijing Olympics coverage in 2008.

Speaking of torture, more details are emerging today of the torture of Tom Fox, the Christian activist who was in Iraq to aid those suffering under the "U.S. occupation" and visit Iraqis who were being "illegally detained."

The occupiers didn't torture him and murder him.

The people he went to Iraq to assist did.

The Associated Press writes:

An Iraqi police patrol also was at the scene, said Falah al- Mohammedawi, an official with the Interior Ministry. He said Fox was found with his hands tied, gunshot wounds to his head and chest, al- Mohammedawi said.

Fox's body was found near a railroad line running through Dawoudi, a mixed Sunni-Shiite area that has been largely shielded from the killing that has raged in other Baghdad neighborhoods.

Reuters writes:

American hostage Tom Fox has been killed and his body, showing signs of torture, left at a garbage dump in Baghdad, police said on Saturday.

One of the policemen who found the body said the 54-year-old peace activist, wearing a gray tracksuit, appeared to have beaten with electric cables before his death. He had a single gunshot wound to the head and his hands were tied behind him.

...A member of the police patrol which found Fox's body told Reuters it had been left beside a railway line on waste ground used as a garbage dump in Baghdad's western Mansour district.

Those accounts are horrible!

What if photos were available of Fox's tortured, lifeless body? Would NBC show those?

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

If NBC's viewers are to truly grasp the brutality of Fox's murderers, wouldn't it be important to show what the torturers did to this man of peace?

Since NBC is obviously SO enamored with torture photos, it would seem that the network would be eager to show images of the results of the torture of Tom Fox.

Out of respect for the loved ones of Fox, I trust that NBC would decide such images to be too painful to display.

However, if NBC and the other lib outlets had images of a man tortured and murdered by the hands of Americans, all bets would be off, no matter how graphic and troubling the photos might be.

Judging from their past and current behavior, I have no doubts about how the Old Media would handle that.

No doubts whatsoever.