Abuse in Iraq -- an ugly story, but it must be told

The cries arise: “Enough already. Too much. No more photos or stories about American forces abusing prisoners in Iraq.”

Are the media overreacting to the horrendous news and horrifying images from Abu Ghraib and the subsequent reports of similarly monstrous behavior by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay? Is the coverage “excessive and just sensationalistic,” as one Washington Post reader complained recently in an online chat with Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post?

I don’t think so.

The media often do overreact to startling stories and pictures, and I’ve criticized this tendency toward unwarranted swarm journalism and wall-to-wall coverage. But there’s a big difference between giving such attention to Janet Jackson’s breast and Howard Dean’s rant and giving it to a seemingly unprecedented and astonishingly well-documented case of American soldiers abusing, humiliating and torturing prisoners in the course of a war whose announced intent was to liberate a country from a brutal tyrant and to establish a democracy built on American values.

Critics who say the media have gone overboard in their coverage of this shameful episode make essentially four arguments. Let me take them one at a time.

The first is the predictable conservative rant that the “liberal media” are plastering the prisoner abuse story all over their front pages, newsmagazine covers and network news shows “in an effort to damage the Bush administration,” as the Family Research Council puts it.

Baloney.

Yes, yes, I know. There are far more liberals than conservatives in the major media. Just last week, the Pew Research Center released its latest study of media professionals, and it showed that at national news organizations, 34% said they were liberal and only 7% said they were conservatives.

Call me naive -- or liberal -- but after 40 years in journalism, I continue to believe that the vast majority of journalists, in the vast majority of situations, are able to set aside their personal political feelings and report fairly and evenhandedly on the events they cover. I know from past e-mail, though, that many people, especially conservatives, just don’t believe this, and no matter what arguments I advance or what evidence I adduce, they’ll never believe it.

So let me just say this: To the extent that journalists are biased, they are biased -- above all -- in favor of a good story. And Abu Ghraib and its aftermath is a good story, a great story. Does that language suggest that journalists are heartless, insensitive ghouls? Well, there is a ghoul gene -- or at least a bad-news gene -- in most journalists. Other peoples’ tragedies are often, alas, our triumphs.

That doesn’t mean we aren’t shocked and sickened by such tragedies, as everyone in and out of the media is by the stories and images from Abu Ghraib. But sickened or not, this is a very important story, one that must be told, and the media would cover it heavily no matter who was president.

Asking for trouble?

The second argument advanced by those who would have the media mute their coverage is that the graphic nature of the coverage encourages our enemies to strike back, gives them propaganda material to recruit more America-hating terrorists.

“This will harden hearts against us and almost certainly result in lost American and Iraqi lives,” Jonah Goldberg wrote in National Review Online.

Others who take this position say the beheading of Nicholas Berg was a vengeful payback that would not have occurred had images of Americans abusing Iraqis not been circulated around the world.

They may be right. But we cannot withhold the news and pictures of outrageous American conduct simply to prevent retaliation. The terrorists have already shown they need no such incentive to wreak inhuman havoc. What were they retaliating for on Sept. 11, 2001? What were they retaliating for when they beheaded Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal five months later?

The third argument against continued, heavy media coverage of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is that such coverage fails to take into account the even more brutal, more abusive, more deadly treatment of prisoners and others by Saddam Hussein.

“Where was the outrage for 30 years ... [when] Saddam Hussein routinely tortured and maimed and humiliated these people?” asked Charles Krauthammer, the syndicated columnist, on a Fox News “Special Report” early this month.

“Since the latest torture story, many editors have failed to present background stories about the millions killed by Saddam,” wrote A.M. Rosenthal, former executive editor of the New York Times, in the New York Sun.

But the U.S. media have devoted considerable time and space over the years to Hussein’s murderous reign. It was one of the running themes of the coverage leading up to and following the bombing of Baghdad and, again, with the capture of Hussein himself.

Contrary to what critics suggest, I haven’t seen any mainstream coverage in this country suggesting that our troops’ treatment of Iraqi prisoners is the moral equivalent of Hussein’s decades-long reign of terror.

I have, however, seen commentary suggesting that what our troops have done -- especially in Abu Ghraib itself, the most notorious of Hussein’s own torture chambers -- makes us look like hypocrites, liars and degenerates in the eyes of the world. And that brings me to the critics’ final argument.

Damage control

Over and over, I’ve heard and read that what happened at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident (or series of incidents), the work of just “a very small number of Americans ... [who] will be investigated and, where guilty, punished,” as Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House of Representatives, put it in the Wall Street Journal. Therefore, these apologists say, our soldiers’ acts are not even remotely comparable to the state-sponsored violence perpetrated by Hussein’s regime.

Well, no, they’re not comparable. But the acts are not isolated either, not just the work of a few low-level troops, not -- as Rush Limbaugh would have it -- the equivalent of “people having a good time” with college fraternity pranks.

The tone set by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and their top aides and advisors, from the beginning of the response to 9/11 to the war and its aftermath in Iraq, made clear that in the pursuit of its objectives, the United States would not be bound by any rule of law, any U.N. vote, any aspect of world opinion or commonly accepted standards of wartime behavior. They might pay occasional lip service to the Geneva Convention, but the U.S. and the U.S. alone would decide how to counter terrorism, whether to attack Iraq, and how to treat anyone we captured or incarcerated. Individual soldiers do not abuse and torture prisoners, take pictures of themselves and their fellow soldiers doing so and disseminate those pictures back home unless they’re confident that they’re doing what they think their superiors want, that they won’t be punished for what they’re doing.

“Somewhere along the line,” says Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, the soldiers “were either told or winked at.”

That’s why this story deserves all the attention, all the time and space it’s getting and will, I hope, continue to get. Only by aggressive, persistent coverage can journalists fulfill their constitutional obligation -- their duty as Americans -- to both inform the public and hold those in power accountable for their actions.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.