The abuse of Iraqi child prisoners continues to go unreported in the U.S. press

Why has the media slacked off in covering the Iraqi prison abuse scandal?
Until the first important story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, along with the first wave of pictures from CBS and the Washington Post, journalists across North America had reported almost nothing on the abuse of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib detention centre. An American Journalism Review report lists several possible reasons for the failure: lack of resources, the difficulties of reporting in Iraq, reporters worried about ‘liberal media’ charges, and stonewalling by the White House.
For whatever reason, major media failed to put the pieces together.
Now, three months after the story of the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners began being widely reported in the U.S. media, the story has all but disappeared from coverage in the major print media and on the national evening news programmes. Mother Jones’ Bradford Plumer asks, “How long will this new stretch of silence last?”
The question becomes particularly cogent when one considers the revelations of abuse that have continued to come to light in the past month. Across the Atlantic, Scotland’s Sunday Herald recently discovered that there are up to 107 child prisoners being held in Iraq (reported earlier by VanRamblings), according to a UNICEF report not yet made public.
In the United States, Rolling Stone magazine got its hands on the classified annexes to the prison report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. The annexes accuse high-ranking military officials of setting conditions for torture in Abu Ghraib. In particular, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who currently runs all of the prisons in Iraq, was sent to Abu Ghraib in order to speed up the intelligence-gathering process. Miller recommended that the jailers should become “actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.” The end result was entirely predictable:

A former Army intelligence officer (told) Rolling Stone that the intent of Miller’s report was clear to everyone involved: “It means treat the detainees like shit until they will sell their mother for a blanket, some food without bugs in it and some sleep.”

The Rolling Stone story is disturbing, not least because of the recent admission by senior Army criminal investigators that the abused inmates had “little or no intelligence value to the United States.”
With so many stories that need reporting, particularly in a Presidential election year down south, where is our media, both in the United States and Canada, when it comes to reporting these very important stories to the public? As Mother Jones avers, “we shouldn’t have to rely on a Scottish newspaper and a music magazine to get the inside dirt on child torture.” Media complicity in prisoner torture must end. Reporters need to wake up.

In a new book titled The Right Nation: How Conservatism Won, written by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Oxford-educated American correspondents for The Economist, the two Brits present a vividly detailed study of why conservatives rule American politics (and, by extension, set the agenda for Canadian politics).
The authors trace the history of the conservative movement from the McCarthy era, when ‘conservatism was a fringe idea,’ to the second Bush administration and the ‘victory of the right’. They dissect the new ‘conservative establishment’, which combines the intellectual force of think tanks, business interests and sympathetic media outlets, and argue that continuing Republican hegemony is likely.
Why? Three simple reasons explain why conservatives keep defeating the left, the authors suggest: The right wins the battle of ideas, has a more determined and focused army of activists, and is reaping the benefits of long-term changes in American society.
And, lest you think that Micklethwait and Wooldridge are themselves conservatives, they take pains in the introduction to disclaim any allegiance to either of America’s “two great political tribes.”
In his review of the book for Mother Jones magazine, Michael Kazin accepts the cogency of the arguments made by Micklethwait and Wooldridge, and writes that if the left is to succeed in reclaiming the hearts and minds of the American people …

“ … they (must) rid themselves of a nagging contempt for the unhip, the poorly educated, and the God-fearing. If the left is not a movement of and for working people — blemishes and all — then it has little chance to regain its previous influence.”

Micklethwait and Wooldridge limn a powerful dynamic that unites the Burkean philosophy of the right-leaning think tanks with the moral passion of religious activists and the entrepreneurial energy of small-business owners. Whether this fusion of interests will disintegrate amidst its own internal contradictions or whether the left will come to reclaim the activist and collectivist agenda of working people remains to be seen.