The White House response to questions regarding the uproar over the cellphone video version of Saddam Hussein’s execution underscores why the administration is losing support on many fronts:
(CBS/AP) The U.S. government worked Wednesday to distance itself from the ugly details of Saddam Hussein’s execution and tried to focus on the symbolism of the former dictator’s death sentence.
“There seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein’s life and less about the first 69 (years), in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said. “That’s why he was executed.”
CBS News correspondent Karen Brown reports that the president hasn’t even seen the video of Hussein’s hanging.
But the Bush administration was sending conflicting signals about the taunting and baiting that accompanied Hussein’s execution, with the White House declining to join criticism of the procedure and the State Department and U.S. military raising questions about it.
Dear Mr. Snow:
It does NOT automatically stand to reason that if people are noting that the official version of the execution that showed an orderly procedure contrasted with the clandestine cellphone version that showed taunting, cursing and a near lynch mob setting they’re downplaying or don’t care about Hussein’s crimes.
This is typical of the way you and the White House choose to answer questions: by going on the offensive and trying to characterize and discredit those who ask questions so an original controversial original issue is obscured or diverted so that the people asking questions have to drop the questions or analysis and try to defend themselves. Or they would then be too intimidated to ask more questions.
This response and the news report also point out a fact: the history of this administration is most noted for it’s brushing aside accepted methods of diplomacy and criticism in a way that has placed itself at odds frequently with the professionals in the State Department. And, here too, we see the White House at odds with how the military chooses to respond (perhaps this means there will be announcements of more retirements?).
We’ve done posts here noting the controversy. No one on this site downplays what Hussein has done. And members of the press who are reporting this controversy and noting that the original version left out some little details (the taunting, the cursing, the very politicization of the hanging moment in a way that further inflamed some tensions in Iraq) are not ignoring what Saddam Hussein did.
If fact, you are the one trying to ignore something: the fact that the original video should not have been released in that form so that when the raw cell phone video came forward it didn’t raise a credibility issue for the already beset Iraq government. No one is trying to divert attention from Hussein’s horrirific crimes. The real diversion efforts are coming from other quarters. And then there’s this: Mr. Bush said the execution was going to be a “milestone.” That has opened the door to legitimate questions as to whether it is proving to be just that and what kind of a milestone it is. And those questions aren’t attempts to forget about Sadaam Hussein and his family’s regime of blood.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.