Afghanistan 'death squad' killings fail to get media, political attention

Afghanistan 'death squad' killings fail to get media, political attention - Washington Times

Reports of a U.S. “death squad” in Afghanistan, complete with the publication of gory photographs, have failed to attract the intense political or media attention afforded a previous war scandal — the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

In 2004, CBS News broadcast an array of photographs showing American jail guards abusing Iraqi detainees. The most famous: a forced pyramid of naked, humiliated prisoners. The depictions touched off an avalanche of media coverage. In Congress, liberals called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Democrats launched inquiries and held a string of well-covered hearings.

In recent months, another wartime embarrassment has emerged. TheArmy charged five soldiers with murder in the deaths of Afghan civilians in what amounted to a “death squad.” The German magazine Der Spiegel published several digital photos of soldiers posing with the dead last month.

Yet the U.S. media have given relatively little coverage, and no one inCongress has called for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to quit, planned hearings or raised questions at budget hearings.

Conservatives, while not seeking negative coverage of the armed forces, say it is another example of a blatant double standard. The reason the mainstream media have barely touched the story, conservatives say, is because it happened under President Obama, not George W. Bush.

HARD NEWS: Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, here in 2004 with U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was ripped by the media for the scandal there. (Associated Press)

“I think any assignment editor would think a story about soldiers murdering people is a bigger story than soldiers putting prisoners in a naked pyramid,” said Tim Graham, an analyst at the Media Research Center, which seeks to expose what it says is liberal press bias. “When you reverse those, what you’re seeing is political opportunism.”

Mr. Graham offered an example. Time magazine, which devoted much coverage to Abu Ghraib and the killings of Iraqi civilians in Haditha during the Bush presidency, had a “tiny paragraph in the front of the magazine” a few issues ago on the death squad photos, he said.

“If you put Abu Ghraib in the Time magazine search engine, you get 17 pages of results,” Mr. Graham said. “When Abu Ghraib happened, the news media operated under the assumption that it came from the top. All the coverage came with the assumption that the president or the defense secretary ordered it. And if they didn’t, they had to deny and prove that they didn’t. In this case, there is no assumption the president would know or approve.”

Even someone at Time is struck by the lack of “death squad” coverage overall.