Papers Run 'Attack Dogs' Prison Photo, But Not on Front Page

By: E&P Staff Most leading newspapers this morning chose not to feature on their front pages the latest horrific Abu Ghraib prison abuse photo from Iraq, showing a naked prisoner menaced by attack dogs. Nearly all of them used it inside, though.

At the same time, few published the explosive companion photo showing the aftermath: Apparently the same prisoner, a few minutes later, with a gash in his leg and a U.S. soldier sitting on him, smiling.

The New York Times ran the first photo in the lower right-hand corner of the front page, while New York's Daily News made it the entire cover, with the headline "Dog of War." At the top of the front page USA Today ran a closeup of the face of the naked prisoner -- with the full photo inside.

Other papers ran the picture inside, including the Boston Herald, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the New York Post, The Washington Post (on page 19), and The Seattle Times.

Few newspapers printed the second photo showing the soldier sitting on the wounded Iraqi.

"We don't have a photo showing the actual bite," Seymour Hersh, author of an article in The New Yorker -- which exposed the abuse at the prison -- told ABC News. "We have a photo of the dogs right at him and then a moment later he's on the ground and there's a large gaping wound and a big pool of blood and it's not hard to draw the obvious inference," he said. "He was definitely attacked in that particular picture."

Hersh's latest article, published today in the New Yorker, says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top military officers sought to keep the prison abuse scandal quiet for several months.