Todd Gitlin - Press Watch: MIA: News of Prison Toll

[NMMNG]

The Bush Administration misses no opportunity to smack the mainstream media around for undermining the otherwise stellar reputation of the United States (Newsweek triggered riots in Afghanistan!). But these same media could plausibly be charged--at least some of the time--with burnishing the Administration's facade.

Although militant jihadists need no particular pretext to justify their anti-American outbursts, surely no feature of the American occupation of Iraq has angered more friends, ex-friends and half-friends abroad--not to mention at home--than the torture and often arbitrary imprisonment of suspects in the chain of prison camps stretching from Cuba's Guantánamo to Iraq's Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan's Bagram. Yet to an astonishing degree, the major news media have given a pass to one egregious feature of these American camps, arguably more egregious than torture, sexual titillation, the use of dogs or the desecration of the Koran: the number of detainees who have died in US custody.

It was left to an opinion columnist, the New York Times's Thomas Friedman, not a news reporter, to declare on May 27 that "the abuse at Guantánamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks?"


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http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050704&s=gitlin

[OneBlueSky]

1. very good and often overlooked point . . . n/t

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