Media's Mission Accomplished: U.S. Troops Now Called 'Baby Killers'

After weeks of repetitive wall-to-wall coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the American media have finally achieved success: U.S. soldiers are now being labeled as war criminals by some of their fellow Americans - just as their predecessors in Vietnam were.

"I've been called a baby killer," ROTC recruit Alexia Regner told the New York Post on Friday, saying the insult was hurled by some of her fellow students at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

"I was pissed. I would never kill a baby," Regner explained. "I was thinking, I took an oath to defend their right to call me that."

Her friend Kristin Sinosky - another ROTC recruit - says even some of her professors have joined in the troop-bashing. One told her, "You must be too busy marching to get your work done."

Undoubtedly, the vast majority of Americans still think military volunteers like Regner and Sinosky represent the best that America has to give. But there's also no question that for some, the obsessive coverage of Abu Ghraib by the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post have tainted the entire U.S. military's image.

Almost since the outset of the war on terrorism, reporters couldn't wait to draw comparisons to Vietnam. When the Abu Ghraib story broke, the coverage was rife with comparisons to the My Lai massacre - the atrocity used by war critics to justify the "baby killer" slur 30 years ago.

It's "Mission Accomplished" for America's journalist class. They've managed to make Abu Ghraib and My Lai synonymous in the minds of enough Americans that now some of today's soldiers fighting the war on terror are being slandered the same way.

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