[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Um, it IS appalling to claim that the press should lay off reporting a fucking WAR ATROCITY. We have freedom of the press here in America for a REASON, dude. The press is SUPPOSED to catch shit like this and expose it to public scrutiny. What they did with the Abu Ghraib story was one of the few instances of war coverage (in the early years) that WASN’T a shameful failure.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, I think the press handled the whole situation very, very badly. Let me get one thing out of the way up front: What happened at Abu Ghraib was WRONG and it should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, those responsible deserved to be arrested , tried and punished. Are we clear on that point? This post is in NO WAY,SHAPE, OR FORM AN EXCUSE FOR ABU GHRAB, if you’re thinking of casting my words that way, forget it, that dog won’t hunt.
What occurred at Abu Ghraib was about 90% abuse and maybe 10% torture. It was reported, however, as torture, torture, torture. U.S. TROOPS TORTURE IRAQIS screamed headlines. Articles titled WAR ATROCITIES REVEALED AT ABU GHRAIB PRISON CAMP hearkened back to the days of Auschwitz. The army was in panic mode, frantically trying to run down what happened. The public was incensed, how could our boys and girls be torturing people? We’re the good guys, right? The press was in a frenzy, fueled by a strong anti-war bias and an appetite for ratings. The perfect media storm built and built and finally broke with the release of the pictures from inside the camp. America held it’s collective breath, peeked between it’s fingers at these horrible, horrible images and saw…
Iraqi men forced to make human pyramids…wha?
A naked man humiliated by being ridiculed by a woman…that’s not good, bu..
A prisoner on a leash…well that’s just wrong…
Dogs barking and straining at the leash towards cowering prisoners…that’s scary..
A hooded man on a box with his genitals wired..See, now that’s just wrong, that IS torture…but electricity was never applied, the man was not harmed…wait, wha?
and so on. In other words, what we saw was the abuse of prisoners. Abuse is bad. Abuse needs to be investigated, stopped, and the abusers need to be prosecuted and punished. Abuse is also endemic to the human condition. Anytime you have one group of people completely in charge of another, abuse is going to occur, be it a small minded guard in a well monitored American prison tripping a manacled prisoner just because he can, a couple of sick cops sodomizing a helpless man with a nightstick or gulag guards gleefully torturing and killing political dissidents in Siberia, it’s going to happen. You can no more prevent it than you could isolate a group of man and women and expect them not to have sex. Prisoner abuse is endemic to the human condition, and most people who have not lived in a cave for 50 years recognize this fact. This does not mean they condone abuse, of course, but they recognize that it’s going to happen, and when it does it needs to be dealt with. Abuse, however, is an entirely different thing than torture, and THAT was the problem. Americans had been promised torture, and what they got was abuse, and what was worse, it completely discredited the anti-war faction that was trying to make political hay with the pictures. They were screaming TORTURE! TORTURE! TORTURE! WHY ARE YOU NOT OUTRAGED???, most people saw abuse, something to be condemned and corrected but not worthy of the vitriol coming from the left, and so they walked away “Yea, sure, it’s terrible dude, whatever” And that, right there, is *the tragedy of the press coverage of Abu Ghraib. * Goaded by both anti-war activists and Democrats seeking to take the White House in 2004, the press went right for the brass ratings ring: Torture. The true tragedy here is that by doing so prematurely they alienated exactly the people that they are supposed to inform, and as the investigation continued and things that actually were torture (or mighty close to it) were discovered, those who weren’t already on board with the anti-war cause tended to ignore it as a “fool me once” situation. Because the coverage was not nuanced at all, it went right to “OMG TORTURE!”, the press lost the ability to truly report events as the investigation unfolded, Dan Rather couldn’t come on the nightly news and say “The investigation into the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib by Army Reservists took an ominous turn as investigators discovered the bodies of several prisoners who appear to have been actually tortured to death and then buried in shallow graves. We go now to Stone Phillips, Live at…” when he’s already told us a dozen times that the abuses we already know about were torture. Since the abuse that we’ve seen pictures of clearly isn’t torture, then in most people’s minds this must be more of the same, and the discovery of actual torture victims is lost in the hubub of the boy who cried wolf. That’s the tragedy of Abu Ghraib and that’s where the press failed IMO