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Not nearly enough our brothers' keepers

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

May 8, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq - While America watched Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testify to Congress yesterday about the human rights scandal in Iraq, I was discovering, uncomfortably, how long and how broadly our machinery of accountability in government has failed on this issue. Rumsfeld is in the spotlight, of course, but the failure has been broader and includes the press.

The Bush administration in Washington and the U.S. authority here in Baghdad have said they learned only fairly recently and with great shock that there was firm evidence that a few U.S. soldiers had been humiliating or mistreating powerless Iraqi prisoners in their care.

"The fact is, this is an exception," said Rumsfeld on Tuesday. "I was stunned by all of it."

I wish that seemed credible. If this scandal were a sudden, isolated eruption, it would make my country look a little more caring, its democracy a bit more protective of the helpless. And it would make my profession look a bit less as though it had fumbled a big responsibility.

The fact is, there is plenty of evidence that this was no exception, that the American abuse of Iraqi civilians is broader and sometimes worse than the sexual humiliation of men in Abu Ghraib. I think we must ask whether U.S. authority in Iraq and in Washington willfully ignored flashing red lights on this issue. Consider:

-- The International Committee of the Red Cross, which inspects the U.S. prisons here, says it privately told U.S. authorities that American troops were abusing prisoners. In January, when U.S. officials here say they first heard of abuses, the ICRC had been warning them directly for at least eight months, it said. Despite the warnings, the ICRC said, the U.S. authority in Iraq permitted "a pattern and a broad system" of abuse.

-- Amnesty International says it compiled credible testimony from Iraqi ex-prisoners, gave it to U.S. authorities in Iraq beginning in June, and asked for an investigation. Eleven months later, Amnesty says it has received no formal response.

-- Human Rights Watch asked to visit U.S. prisons in Iraq but was rebuffed. While America cannot accommodate such requests, the autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq is more accommodating, opening its prisons to the monitoring group.

-- In November, Abdel Basset Turki, the human rights minister of the U.S.-appointed government, asked the U.S. administrator, Paul Bremer directly for an investigation of human rights problems, "in jails in particular," he has told the French news agency. He never got an answer and quit his post last month.

We in the press are supposed to hold governments accountable for their treatment of the powerless. In the past year, no one has been more powerless under America's authority than the Iraqis, Afghans and other foreigners, usually non-English-speakers, who have wound up in Abu Ghraib, the U.S. prisons of Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan, or Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

While the American press has reported parts of this story, I fear we have pursued it neither broadly nor consistently. I've done no careful study on U.S. press coverage of human rights issues in Iraq (we'll need that).

But consider this example: In the week of July 20, 2003, when Amnesty International raised its first public alarm with an often dramatic 10,000-word report on U..S. troops mistreating Iraqi prisoners, the U.S. press missed the story. The Philly Inquirer gave it five sentences, the New York Times one (beginning with the phrase: "In other developments today"). Newsday, the paper whose foreign news I help to edit, managed not to mention it. I am embarrassed to say I don't know how.

For the record, the Irish Times in Dublin ran two stories, totalling 1,500 words.

America's journalists cannot miss the story now. Often the press comes to the rescue of the public, digging out the issues that we as a people need to be worrying about. This time, it may be an outraged public that is rescuing the press from our lack of focus on an issue critical to the well-being of thousands of imprisoned people, the outcome of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, America's relations with the Islamic world -- and, arguably, our democracy.