by TChris

The secretary of defense and the national security adviser debate "whether there was any way to stop newspapers and television news programs from showing graphic photographs of the victims."

Pictures of Abu Ghraib? No. Pictures of My Lai, 1969.

A transcript of this 1969 telephone conversation, with its uncanny echoes of the Iraq war and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, at least in the fact of the photographs, if not in the severity of the wrongdoing, was released on Wednesday by the National Archives as part of 20,000 pages of records of Mr. Kissinger's telephone conversations.

The tapes show a secretary of defense frustrated by his inability to bury the truth.

In their conversation on Nov. 21, 1969, about the My Lai massacre, Mr. Laird told Mr. Kissinger that while he would like "to sweep it under the rug," the photographs prevented it.