Capturing the US Media’s Attention

It’s yet another a sad commentary on the state of the US media that (with rare exceptions, such as this and this) they completely ignored the stories of the crimes being committed in Abu Ghraib prison until there were pictures. The stories had been circulating for months, however. It seems that Arab language news channels regularly reported on it, and today’s NYTimes reports on the fact that the Red Cross had been complaining about the abuses since last fall.

One tidbit of interest about the reports that the ICRC presented months ago of abuses in the prisons of Iraq:

In addition, [the ICRC spokesman] said, the reports were given to senior officials in the Bush administration, but he declined to say which ones.

He said that it was the committee’s practice to make its complaints known widely inside a government to prevent any one person from sitting on the report, allowing senior officials to claim ignorance later on.

It looks like we can expect the reveleations regarding who knew what and when to keep coming.

Kash