In The New York Post, Deborah Orin tells of a chilling Iraqi torture-and-murder video that was recently shown to a gathering of Washington reporters:

The video only lasts four minutes or so [...] I couldn’t bear to watch, so I walked out until it was over.

Some who stayed wished they hadn’t. They told of savage scenes of decapitation, fingers chopped off one by one, tongues hacked out with a razor blade — all while victims shriek in pain [...]

The video has been available to reporters for a while, but you won’t see anything about it on the news. Why? Because it was Saddam Hussein’s henchmen committing the act. Orin continues:

No surprise, since no newscast would air the videos of Nick Berg and Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl getting decapitated, or of U.S. contractors in Fallujah getting torn limb from limb by al Qaeda operatives.

Why?

“Because most [journalists] want Bush to lose,” says AEI scholar Michael Ledeen, who helped host the screening of the Saddam video.

[...]

So the world sees photos of U.S. interrogators using dogs to scare prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But not the footage of Saddam’s prisoners getting fed — alive — to Doberman pinschers on Saddam’s watch.

Orin continues, making a point similar to one in my recent article on Abu Ghraib & Nick Berg:

AEI spokeswoman Veronique Rodman, puzzled by the minimal interest in the Saddam torture video, is sure that if it was a video of equally horrific torture committed by U.S. troops, the press would find ways to show or report it.

Reporters have to face up to the fact that right now, if we highlight the wrongs that Americans commit but not — out of squeamishness — the far worse horrors committed by others, we become propaganda tools for the other side.

The article concludes with a damning indictment of The New York Times:

Saddam’s torture videos may be too awful to show, but it’s hard to explain the low media interest in the story of seven Iraqi men who had their right hands chopped off by Saddam’s thugs — and then got new prosthetic arms and new hope in America.

They’re eloquent, they’re available, they’re grateful for the U.S. liberation of Iraq. No one can better talk about Saddam’s tortures — and no one is more eager to do so. Yet, as of yesterday, the New York Times had written 177 stories on Abu Ghraib — with over 40 on the front page. The self-proclaimed “paper of record” hadn’t written a single story about those seven Iraqi men.

Apparently, the only news that’s fit to print is news that reflects negatively on the United States. It isn’t treasonous to report our mistakes and setbacks, but when those become the only thing reported, then our media becomes a propaganda tool used by our enemies.