How many people are hoping this comes out so it does damage to your political enemies instead of stopping and punishing those that are the perpetrators?
The Abu Ghraib story broke when we saw visual proof of torture. Why not sooner?posted by MzB at 7:17 AM on July 17, 2004
[S]cattered reports last summer and fall by the AP, Reuters, The Washington Post, and others alluded to mistreatment of prisoners, but none suggested the story's magnitude. Traditionally, Red Cross dossiers on breaches of the Geneva Conventions are secret, as a condition of the group's access to military prisons. But given the degree of the organization's frustration over all those months, it is surprising that little or nothing of the Red Cross's findings made its way into the press. Amnesty International, meanwhile, was under no such stricture, and was putting out press releases. One in July 2003 cited "reports of torture" by Coalition forces. Similarly, the contents of Major General Taguba's stark expose went undiscovered until the end of April, even though the Pentagon announced in January that his study was under way.
Reservists and National Guard troops in the prison were wholly unprepared for the task of dealing with detainees, as Major General Taguba and others pointed out. Some digging by the media in Baghdad might have exposed the dangers inherent in that situation. Systematic interviewing of released prisoners might have given correspondents a whiff of what was going on inside the prison.
Perhaps some news organizations were reluctant to believe that Americans engage in torture. One editor, David Frum of National Review, in a CNN interview, seemed to fear the global backlash. He said he wished the story had been told in text only, no photographs. We disagree. Hiding ugly truths to defend policy is out of place on news pages and newscasts. Michael Getler, the ombudsman at The Washington Post, wondered on May 9 why his paper "was slow off the mark on this story"; readers questioned, he wrote, why the Post "did not dig into this prisoner abuse scandal much earlier, and why it hesitated, after CBS and The New Yorker broke the story, to put it on the front page." Those are questions worth posing to virtually the entire U.S. journalism community.
Since the story broke, the press has pursued it aggressively -- and with a much-needed dose of skepticism, as the administration attempts to lay blame on a handful of soldiers. But regrettably and unnecessarily, the facts lay at the outer edge of journalism's radar screen for too long.
« Older The 2004 Flash Forward Winners... | Is it a gargoyle? No, it is th... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by badstone at 11:00 AM on July 16, 2004