Writer: Mainstream media ignored torture, homicide

RAW STORYPublished: Friday September 8, 2006

A column at The Columbia Journalism Review has revealed the media establishment's collective reluctance to report incidents of detainee abuse, torture, and even homicide in the early days of the "war on terror," RAW STORY can report.

Writer Eric Umansky goes into extensive detail--relaying several anecdotes directly from journalists who attempted to cover such incidents--regarding mainstream network and newspaper distate for negative coverage of the war.

One British reporter that Umansky spoke to discussed an unnamed show that passed on his story of secret CIA prisoner transfers, telling the reporter that they preferred items with "somebody who's innocent."

Excerpts from the article, available in full here, follow.

Carlotta Gall was curious. It was early December 2002, and Gall, the Afghanistan correspondent for The New York Times, had just seen a press release from the U.S. military announcing the death of a prisoner at its Bagram Air Base. Soon thereafter the military issued a second release about another detainee death at Bagram. “The fact that two had died within weeks of each other raised alarm bells,” recalls Gall. "I just wanted to know more. And I came up against a blank wall. The military wouldn’t release their names; they wouldn’t say where they released the bodies."

She visited Khost and left empty-handed, but a few weeks later, she got another tip and traveled back. The body of one of the detainees had been returned, a young taxi driver known as Dilawar. Gall met with Dilawar’s family, and his brother handed Gall a death certificate, written in English, that the military had issued. "It said, 'homicide,' and I remember gasping and saying, 'Oh, my God, they killed him,'" says Gall. "I hadn’t really been thinking that before."
Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run," says Gall. "If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week."
...
"Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story," says Frantz. "On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations."

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