Page 208 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

198 Chapter 8

ceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is all
about."'' It should be pointed out, however---contrary to Starr's claims-that
public anger over the Abu Ghraib scandal was directed overwhelmingly at the
mistreatment of prisoners, not at a soldier's choice to break Pentagon protocol
by distributing the pictures.
Some journalists and editors throughout the mainstream press did feel that
they made a mistake by not uncovering the tragedy sooner. Philip Taubman, the
Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Times shared his evaluation: "We
didn't do our job with this [scandal] until the photographs appeared on CBS."
This, Taubman explained, represented "a failure of newsgathering" in regards to
Abu ~hraib.'~ The American Journalism Review laid out a number of reasons
for the media's failure to report Abu Ghraib sooner, citing such factors as "the
Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and controlling the news agenda;
dangerous conditions that limited reporting by Western reporters in much of
Iraq," in addition to the nationalistic climate of the media after 911 1 and during
the Iraq war which discouraged reporting presenting strong criticisms of the war
effort and American troops in ~ra~.'~
The Bush administration and American military have generally reacted to
Abu Ghraib so as to attempt to limit the future release of other materials impli-
cating the U.S. with human rights violations at Abu Ghraib. In 2005, the Penta-
gon attempted to prohibit the release of emerging video evidence of U.S. abuse
of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The argument given was that such images could
assist in the recruitment of Islamist forces, a trend which may threaten American
lives in ~ra~.~' These types of restrictions on access to information will only
make it more difficult for stories like Abu Ghraib to break in the future, as the
military has emphasized its desire to cover up its human rights abuses, rather
than work toward prohibiting them in a transparent fashion. Further restrictions
on the part of the government have been followed by increased media efforts to
reinforce military secrecy. In November of 2005, the Washington Post reported
a feature story about secret overseas American prisons in Eastern Europe that
were holding terrorist suspects. The paper withheld the locations of these prisons
7
at the request of the U.S. government, citing the possibili that the release of
such information might "disrupt counter-terrorism efforts."'
Media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting protested the paper's
refusal to print the locations of these bases: "Without the basic fact of where
these prisons are, it's difficult if not impossible for 'legal challenges' or 'politi-
cal condemnation' to force them to close. . . . Given that Vice President Dick
Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss [have sought] to exempt the CIA from
legislation that would prohibit 'cruel and degrading treatment' of prisoners, and
that CIA-approved 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' include torture tech-
niques like 'waterboarding' [where prisoners are made to think they're drown-
ing], there's no reason to think that prisons that operate in total secrecy will have
fewer abuses than Abu Ghraib or Afghanistan's ~agram."~~
The events at Abu Ghraib are not an isolated incident when it comes to the
abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Evidence has since shown that the abuse and torture
of prisoners was not restricted only to Abu Ghraib, but other jails, such as one in