The Paradox of Witholding Information

We haven't seen much chatter about Dexter Filkins' piece in the Times magazine -- the one about Nathan Sassaman, a Lt. Col. who covered up the killing of an Iraqi and the near-killing of a second. It was a fait accompli that the conservobloggers would ignore it since it's presumably anti-military.

[At the end of the post, we note the amusing irony in that assumption.]

But there's no reason for the Left to give it short shrift. Not when it contains observations like this:

One paradox ... was that the Americans could have shot Marwan and Zaydoon that night, and no American officer would have raised an eyebrow. Two young Iraqi men, in a nasty Sunni town, caught driving a pickup after curfew: Iraqi civilians have been killed for less. But in exploring the possibilities of "nonlethal" force - an idea meant to spare Iraqis, not kill them - the soldiers had crossed a line.

But where is the line? How much more serious was it to throw an Iraqi civilian into the Tigris, which was not approved, than it was to, say, fire an antitank missile into an Iraqi civilian's home, which was? Where is the line that separates nonlethal force that is justified - and sometimes very painful - from nonlethal force that is criminal? At trial, attorneys for Perkins argued that their client should be spared in part because the Army did not adequately prepare its soldiers for the guerrilla war in Iraq. In the words of Joshua Norris, one of Perkins's lawyers, Sassaman's soldiers were operating in a "doctrinal vacuum." The generals wanted higher body counts, and they wanted the insurgency brought under control, but they left the precise tactics up to the soldiers in the field.

Is there anything more frightening than seeing the words nonlethal force in one graf and doctrinal vacuum in the next? It's a recipe for Abu Ghraib, certainly, and worse [of course, in that case, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said, "I'm tired of this MP mentality; I want them to shoot first and use nonlethal force later." How nice.].

But, for our money, the really chilling part is this:

Sassaman decided that if he tried to explain to [his supervisor] what had happened - that his men had indeed thrown the Iraqis into the water but that they had come out alive - then [his supervisor] would likely go ahead and arrest his men. Sassaman decided that throwing the Iraqis into the Tigris was wrong but not criminal and that publicizing it could whip up anti-American feeling.

Let's assume that "publicizing" is synonymous for media, okay? And let's make that perilous leap and assume that Sassaman's actually telling the truth.

The lesson here is that -- if you believe the Right -- when the Left-leaning media outlets report on military malfeasance, it's flagrantly anti-American or anti-military, or what have you, and brings down the morale of the troops overseas [Austin Bay: The [Abu Ghraib] photos are an anti-American propagandist's centerfold, and provide America-haters with a new Exhibit A to support their perpetual charges of American hypocrisy and decadence. ... They damage American military and political efforts.]. However, in a case when troops actually did commit crimes, the knee-jerk reaction of said military is to cover up said malfeasance for fear of publicity from said Left-leaning media outlets. Which, in turn, would in turn whip up anti-American feelings...

Forgive us, but this is a mobius strip of mendacity.

Here's a proposed compromise between the media and the military: if you can curtail the institutionalized clusterfucks, we'll stop reporting them.