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Printer-friendly version Leaking self-doubt by Brendan O'Neill Is there no end to America's photo fallout over Iraq? Since CBS first broadcast the torture snaps from Abu Ghraib prison on 29 April 2004, followed by further revelations of torture and photographic evidence in the New Yorker on 1 May and in the Washington Post on 6 May, the pictures have appeared everywhere. They have gone 'to the ends of the Earth', says one American writer, 'and have painted brilliantly and indelibly an image of America that could remain with us for years, if not decades' . President George W Bush did a special turn on Arab TV to denounce the torture depicted in the photos as 'un-American' and 'unacceptable'. One British journalist says the photos symbolise 'the destruction of morality', another that they have exposed 'a hole in America's heart'. The Glasgow Sunday Herald says they are 'the photos that lost the war' . Former supporters of the war have undergone Damascene conversions after looking at snaps of Private Lynndie England and co lording it over naked, hooded Iraqis. The photos have become tools of protest in the Middle East. In Baghdad protesters held makeshift placards with the Abu Ghraib pictures attached, under the heading 'This is what America does'. At the Commonwealth cemetery in Gaza, printouts of the black-and-white photos seeming to show a British soldier urinating on an Iraqi prisoner - first published in the Daily Mirror and since exposed as fakes - have been stuck on to the headstones of British First World War graves with the words 'Curse will chase you forever' . On 11 May 2004, an Islamic fundamentalist website unveiled a video showing the beheading of Nick Berg, a young American civilian in Iraq, and said he was killed in revenge for the 'satanic degradation' of Iraqis by Americans at Abu Ghraib . On 12 May, CBS broadcast a video diary shot by a female soldier in Camp Bucca prison in southern Iraq, in which she confessed to hating Iraqi detainees and having thrown rocks at them. The Washington Post has announced that, thus far, it has only published 10 of 1,000 shocking photos from Abu Ghraib in its possession. On 13 May, US Congressmen and women given access to the as-yet unpublished torture photos said they are 'sickening', 'heartbreaking' and 'worse than expected'. How did such sensitive pictures, which have apparently lost America its war, become so widely available? How did they get into the hands of not one major media outlet, but three - CBS, the New Yorker and the Washington Post - leading to a media scramble over who would publish them first? Tracing how the photos became such hot public property reveals something striking, not only about the torture scandal, but about the coalition itself. This is a story, not of investigative journalism or antiwar activists exposing imperialist America to the world, but rather of America exposing its own uncertainty for all to see. The photos appear to have come from within US military or political circles; In a sense, the publication of these photos to international outrage can be seen as the externalisation of America's own self-doubt about Iraq, and about its own mission in the world. Many claim that the torture story shows good old-fashioned investigative journalism in action. Who first aired photos of American soldiers tormenting their Iraqi prisoners?
For months, the media have let the Abu Ghraib story slip through their hands Some journalists have certainly done some good work in revealing evidence of torture at Abu Ghraib, in particular veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker, the journalist who managed to get hold of the US military's internal 53-page report on the torture as well as of the photos. And once the story became public the media was key in making it the big global issue of the day. But over the past four months the media have been slack on the Abu Ghraib story, allowing it to slip through their hands on more than one occasion. The driving force for the torture scandal was not in Washington's or New York's newsrooms. This story, it seems, did not come about as a result of journalists chasing it; US officials first revealed that they were investigating such allegations in a news release on 16 January 2004. A soldier reported the allegations to US military commanders on 13 January; Coyne says the US media did little actively to follow up US officials' announcement of an investigation into torture at Abu Ghraib. In her 8 May column for the Salt Lake Tribune, she pointed out that the New York Times ran a 612-word story on 17 January, the day after the announcement was made, and then 'the story disappeared' - until the Washington Post ran a 983-word story on the investigations on 21 March, followed by a 442-word story in America's Knight Ridder newspapers on 22 March . It was another six weeks before the torture story became big news and the photos were published. The photos from Abu Ghraib may have only recently been published but many in the American media have known of their existence for months. Barbara Starr of CNN's Washington Bureau wrote a news report about the photos four months ago, on 21 January. She reported that a source from inside the Pentagon had told CNN that US military command's investigation of abuse was 'focused on Abu Ghraib', and that 'US soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners', photographs 'which may depict male and female soldiers' . Why didn't CNN pursue the story further, and try to get hold of the photos that its rivals CBS would eventually unveil 100 days later on 29 April? Both Barbara Starr and CNN's PR spokesperson decline to comment on how CNN appears to have lost such a big story. According to one of the American military families that was reportedly central to the CBS News report about torture in Abu Ghraib, much of the media have shied away from the story over the past two months. Ivan Frederick, father of Staff Sergeant Frederick, an army reservist turned prison guard who was one of those interrogated by US military command in Baghdad over the events in Abu Ghraib, has tried to make the torture story into news. He feared that his son, and other soldiers, would be made into scapegoats for bigger 'command lapses' in Iraq detention centres, and that the best safeguard against such scapegoating was to make as many people as possible aware of what had occurred. In March, Frederick reportedly sent letters to 17 members of US Congress and various media outlets, but got 'virtually no response' (10). In desperation he turned to David Hackworth, a retired US colonel who now runs a website criticising US military strategy and calling for a better deal for American soldiers. Hackworth tells me that Frederick had tried to contact Bill O'Reilly, who presents the popular O'Reilly Factor news show on Fox News, and many other media types, but nobody wanted to touch the story. Hackworth put them in touch with CBS and five weeks later, on 29 April, CBS became the first media outlet to broadcast the torture story. It suggests that it came about less as a result of campaigning journalism and more as a result of pushiness on the part of aggrieved elements in the military or close to the military.
The torture scandal has become bound up in deeper disagreements among the US elite This discontent between the military and civilian leaderships in the Pentagon - between generals and officers who prefer to fight straightforward wars for a clear national interest and Bushies who launched a self-serving war in Iraq for political ends - has been brewing for two years. Military figures have criticised Rumsfeld's war strategy and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz's vision of a 'domino' effect in the Middle East, where bringing democracy to Iraq would apparently allow democracy to flourish across the region. For commanders who prefer quick and clean, and preferably small-scale, military ops, the Bush administration's political stunt in Iraq has grated. Some military figures have described Bush officials' plans for Iraq as 'grandiose and unattainable' and as requiring 'way too much fairy dust' (16). Such clas...
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