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Failures of Imagination
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of September/October 2006 Issue Columbia Journalism Review
Posted: November 11th, 2006
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp
It was early December 2002. [Carlotta] 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. Gall: I just wanted to know more. And I came up against a blank wall." The body of one of the detainees had been returned, a young taxi driver known as Dilawar. Gall met with Dilawars family, and his brother handed Gall a death certificate...that the military had issued. It said, homicide. The press release announcing Dilawars death stated...heart attack, a conclusion repeated by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. But the death certificate, the authenticity of which the military later confirmed to Gall, stated that Dilawar who was just twenty-two years old died as a result of blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease. Gall filed a story. It sat for a month. I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run. Galls story...had been at the center of an editorial fight. Roger Cohen, then the Timess foreign editor: I pitched it, I dont know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one. The story ran on page fourteen under the headline "U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody." The Times also reported that officers who had overseen the Bagram prison at the time were promoted; another, who had lied to investigators, was transferred to help oversee interrogations at Abu Ghraib and awarded a Bronze Star.
Note: Why does it take a university journal to ask the hard questions? Again and again, news that should be front-page headlines is buried on insignificant pages or not reported at all. This key article from one of the most respected schools of journalism in the world tells it all about the unreported and underreported violent abuse of prisoners condoned by elements of the U.S. military. Don't miss reading this most powerful story in its entirety.
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