If Frank Rich is any guide, and most times he's perceptive in these matters cum politics and pop culture, we just might want to see the new documentary about Al Jazeera, "Control Room". He claims that "we're taken taken into our own Central Command's media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action."
But let's fast forward
It has taken a while for Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers to figure out just how much their power to enforce their own narrative of this war has waned. Their many successes in news management have been their undoing, leaving them besotted by their own invincibility and ill-equipped for failure. Clearly they still believed they could control the pictures. According to Mr. Rumsfeld's own congressional testimony, he was "surprised" that lowly enlisted men could be "running around with digital cameras" e-mailing grotesque Kodak snapshots all over the world. Even after making that discovery, such was his and General Myers's habitual arrogance that they didn't bother to get ahead of the Abu Ghraib story -- or to familiarize themselves with its particulars -- once CBS gave them a full two weeks of head's up before "60 Minutes II" broadcast it to the world. Or maybe they just hoped that the press's wartime self-censorship would continue. After all, in happier times, Larry Flynt had done the patriotic thing by refusing to publish half-nude snapshots of Jessica Lynch that fell into his hands at the time of her greatest celebrity.
Let's rewind.