News Blurbs for Friday, 20 August 2004

An interesting summation and a whole slew of outgoing source links today from the Christian Science Monitor regarding the latest developments in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse case. As expected, only a handful of low-ranking military personnel are going to be held accountable, despite objections from Abu Ghraib’s former commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and numerous others.

Sen. Ted Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government’s secret “no-fly” list, apparently because the name “T. Kennedy” has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects. Reginald T. Shuford, senior ACLU counsel, said, “Someone of Senator Kennedy’s stature can simply call a friend to have his name removed but a regular American citizen does not have that ability. He had to call three times himself.” [Source: Washington Post] Ironic, isn’t it?

Matt Taibbi of the NYPress offers some interesting commentary and criticism on the Howard Kurtz article of August 12 titled The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story in the Washington Post. Personally, I don’t read the print version (I find the online versions of most papers easier to search), but I’m well aware that neither paper (NYTimes or Washington Post) presented balanced coverage of the entire build-up leading to and through the present-day war in Iraq on their front pages. Much of the front page coverage in the papers was entirely one-sided, in favor of the Bush Administration, while dissenting articles and even leaked memos and other things were published deep inside the papers (and the websites, too). Overall, however, were I comparing and rating the two most prominent papers on their coverage, I would give the Washington Post much higher marks for their investigative journalists and the coverage inside that paper’s website. I feel the Washington Post has done an outstanding job of uncovering things that Our Employee and his Administration would rather have buried from public view. Read the links above, it’s fascinating stuff.