 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.
