Reader's Forum: The American press: They saw no evil, heard no evil, reported no evil?

As American legislators and pundits gather to heap criticism on the Bush administration over the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, the American press has silently slithered away from taking any responsibility ...

As American legislators and pundits gather to heap criticism on the Bush administration over the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, the American press has silently slithered away from taking any responsibility for its inability to report on the behavior of U.S. soldiers until the story was dumped on its lap.
Since the very first weeks of the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the survivors of U.S. bombings and those interviewed after suffering U.S. or allied captivity spoke repeatedly to the world media of the abuse, torture and murder visited upon them since October 2001. The American press, repeatedly, deferred to the American military's orders of no comments on ongoing investigations.
We still have no indication from the embedded reporters and other American journalists in Afghanistan whether the U.S. military is conducting routine abuse and torture of prisoners as part of its interrogation of terror suspects. Even the Pentagon's repeated assertions that interrogation techniques practiced by U.S. civilian and military agencies are not torture have yet to be decisively analyzed by the American media.
In the most obvious case, as early as June 2003, there were clear indications that the allied forces in Iraq were abusing and torturing their prisoners. I was in England on May 30, 2003, when The Sun newspaper reported on the arrest of a British soldier in connection with an investigation of photographs showing torture of Iraqi prisoners.
The photographs were discovered by Kelly Tilford, a 22-year-old working at a photo processing shop. Revolted by the sight of British soldiers engaged in sex acts with prisoners and dangling an Iraqi prisoner from a crane, Tilford called the police. The photographs and the resulting arrest drew considerable media attention in England.
A full-text search of the Lexis-Nexis news database using the terms Iraq, sex and torture during May, June and July of 2003 reveals that The New York Times published one 338-word news report on the incident on May 31. The Washington Post published nothing on this incident. While some of the American broadcast news networks reported the story in brief, none cared to examine the issue in detail, or investigate the possibility of such abuse being carried out by U.S. troops.
A number of stories were published and broadcast in the American media that summer that mentioned Iraq, torture and sex, but all of them came in the wake of the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons, Qusay and Uday, in July 2003.
The American news media were willing to devote thousands of words and hours of tape to the horrors of Qusay and Uday, but largely ignored the possibility of similar horrors being visited upon Iraqis by U.S.-led coalition troops.
Perhaps the news media's editors and reporters felt they were being patriotic by not expending too much energy on investigating allegations of abuse carried out by their nation's soldiers. Perhaps they were tired, or lazy, or just too embedded to realize that the stories of beatings, humiliation and killings that they did not hear or see were actually allegations of war crimes.
A widespread movement in America is currently trying to rebuild the myth of an honorable military force. One of the first targets of this movement was presidential candidate John Kerry, criticized for his testimonies alleging war crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.
If one listens carefully, the underlying theme of these anti-Kerry veterans and support groups is simple -- the U.S. military simply did not commit war crimes in Vietnam. This, of course, flies in the face of history, but far be it for the mainstream American media to call attention to the facts.
The inability of the American media's mainstream to display courage in supporting facts and questioning myths regarding war, what Robert Fisk described to me as America's ""journalistic cowardice,"" has failed to convey the reality of war to the American people in a timely fashion.
The Toledo Blade, for instance, won a Pulitzer Prize in April 2004 for its investigation into the allegations of massacres of Vietnamese civilians conducted by the elite Tiger Force recon unit of the celebrated U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division. The Blade published its investigative stories confirming the massacres in October 2003. The massacres were committed in 1967.
According to The Blade's own reporting, the Army investigated these massacres from 1971 to 1975, but the story remained secret until The Blade's investigation was published in 2003. Even then, the mainstream newspapers refused to pick up the story. The story only hit these elite news organizations prominently after The Blade won the Pulitzer.
Every country has problems reporting and investigating the actions of its own military. Every reporter who has ever reported on his or her own troops has had to deal with personal questions regarding patriotism and betrayal. Only the best war correspondents understand the fine distinction between justifiable journalistic discretion and an outright cover-up.
The most famous massacre of the Vietnam War, for instance, was not reported as such by a war correspondent. When the story of the My Lai broke on March 17, 1968, it was faithfully reported by The New York Times as a successful operation that had killed 128 enemy soldiers. The sources for this report were American officials in Saigon.
As Phillip Knightley notes in his book, ""The First Casualty,"" it was not a war correspondent in Vietnam but a U.S.-based journalist, Seymour Hersh, who uncovered the My Lai civilian massacre in his investigative reporting on the Pentagon. Hersh's story, which was turned down by Life magazine, was finally published on Nov. 13, 1968, after Hersh sold it to the Dispatch News Service.
It has taken months, and sometimes years after war crimes, such as torture and massacres, for journalists to realize the follies of their nation's military. In many cases, the passage of years only serves to reinforce the myth of an honorable military, and washes away the stains of previous horrors. That is, until the next war comes along.
Having trained in a military organization and having reported on a few, I know what most other war correspondents know. Discipline and morale chip away as days turn into weeks during combat. When the war crimes occur, we would like to believe that they are isolated incidents, but we ignore the fact that the military chain of command dictates the most trivial of the soldiers' day-to-day activities. War crimes often occur because the chain of command condones them.
Having seen soldiers punished for tying their shoe laces in a non-regulation fashion, I am stupefied by the naivete of those who believe individual sol