Photos released Wednesday by the Los Angeles Times ”“ showing smiling US troops in Afghanistan posing with the remains of suicide bombers ”“ are reigniting a debate about the ethics of publishing such photos during wartime.
The question: What is the newspaper’s responsibility to national security weighed against informing the public?
US military officials asked the newspaper not to publish any of the photos, concerned about the possibility of “inciting violence and perhaps causing needless casualties” among US troops abroad, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby told the Times.
Times Editor Davan Maharaj responded that the photos “fulfill our obligation to readers to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan, including the allegation that the images reflect a breakdown in unit discipline that was endangering US troops.”
The military wants to return to the military being a professional career, how not to do it here.
that there are people who actually seem to believe that question retains more than a shadow of the meaning it had in 1941.
And that’s if we even managed to get past the first hurdle and acknowledged the term “at war” to still be a meaningful utterance in this context.
“The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer