Why Media Missed Iraq Prison Abuse Scandal

By: Dennis Anderson Journalists are always on the hunt for "the big story" and the "next story" and sometimes we just get there too late.

Any journalist must applaud Seymour M. Hersh for his thorough and dreadful examination in The New Yorker of lives ruined behind the walls at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The journalist who brought the My Lai massacre before the American public has not faltered this time either. Americans need to know when their fellow countrymen are behaving in a way that brings shame on the very ideals that we say define us as Americans.

What do I mean by saying that sometimes we just get there too late for the big story? In the aftermath of the invasion and guerrilla war that continues to make Iraq our first and worst news story -- which I've covered on two occasions as an embedded reporter -- serious questions about the role of the National Guard and the so-called private "contractor" war have eluded large-scale media scrutiny. These stories were near at hand, but war is hectic and it's easy to miss one.

There have been a few contrarians and hair shirts. Retired Col. David Hackworth, for example, was a tireless pundit who continuously asserted that the Guard and reserves were generally ill-used and unready for this war. From my front-row seat, embedded with the California National Guard on its way to war in Iraq last spring, I often took issue with Hackworth's assertions that "weekend warriors" could not, and should not, carry the same burden as the regulars. The Guard troops I saw, in the main, were serious about their training, and took their responsibility with gravitas.

I moved into Iraq last spring with a California Guard combat support truck company that logged more than 2 million miles hauling tanks, ammo and rockets where they were needed, including with the 4th Infantry Division that captured Saddam Hussein; and then this spring with the Marines during the siege of Fallujah and Ramadi. These second-line defense soldiers were simply first-class GIs -- good troops who knew how to do their job of combat trucking support.

National Guard soldiers not ready to do their job often were parked in "medical hold" units stateside. And because their ranks were thinned, the Guard truckers would have their ranks bolstered by "contractor" drivers such as Thomas Hamill, who was taken prisoner and escaped this past weekend. My friends and sources in the Guard called this conflict, with some irony, "the contractor war."

What about the reserve MPs at Abu Ghraib? The top secret report gathered by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba and aired by The New Yorker this week cites a few terse and ugly facts that should have been apparent to any of the others who lifted the veil on Abu Ghraib -- and blinked.

Among his major findings were that there were too few guards for too many thousand prisoners (and the guards, of course, found their safety at risk on a daily basis). Next, Taguba's report cited that the MP reservists who arrived to provide checkpoint security and traffic direction in Baghdad had no previous training as jailers. Finally, Taguba reported that that the reservist in charge of the Abu Ghraib command, Gen. Janis Karpinski, was rarely seen at the prison -- a leader absent from command, leadership and direct supervision.

There is a convergence of ugly facts meeting like a collision in a four-way intersection. Too few soldiers -- that has been the understood truth by virtually all troops on the ground since soon after the fall of Baghdad. And to maintain the numbers of soldiers with which we have unsuccessfully tried to secure Iraq, the Pentagon resorted to massive commitment of the National Guard and the reserves. Such troops generally were prepared to provide homeland security duties, to fight fires and calm civil disorders. They prepared for battle with the regulars, but were given little to no preparation for a postwar occupation that turned into a 21st century major conflict.

In the Guard company that I covered, the average age of soldier was 38, and many soldiers were in their late forties and a good number in their fifties. Some were Vietnam retreads. A woman staff sergeant in the unit who rode convoy on Iraq's dangerous supply routes was a grandmother, nearly 60. Somebody finally cried "wait a minute!" and put her in a headquarters job. Did America know full well that much of the weight in its war in Iraq was borne by grandfathers, and even a few grandmothers, some old enough to be grandparents of the front-line regulars?

As to the training issue: Isn't there something fishy about putting reservists in charge of a prison intended to hold not only criminals retrieved from Saddam's day, but also "threats to the coalition" and "high value prisoners"? Don't you think someone would want the regulars handling that, and that there would be specific training protocols for running a place that is the combat zone equivalent of Guantanamo? Where does this buck stop?

President Bush has told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to hold the guilty accountable. Who is accountable for stationing too few guards, with too little training, from a reserve of troops who do not ply their profession on a full-time basis? It is also implied they fell under the control of military intelligence, or even "civilian contractors" working on interrogation.

As for the private spooks and hired guns, little was heard about these private sector shadow warriors until the four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and desecrated, strung from a bridge in the flashpoint city of Fallujah. But they can be seen like ants at a picnic in the Green Zone and at Baghdad International Airport. Although these "contractors" are providing valuable security services, they also have no defined training, no set "rules of engagement," and apparently no ties to the Geneva Convention, which puts those on active duty at peril of their freedom if they wantonly ignore its sensible and humane requirements for prisoner handling.

The media, on the national and global scale, certainly knows how to pounce on the "big story" and how to follow "the next story." But the story of how supporting the war in Iraq with a 40% Guard and reserve contingent, many of whom were not well prepared for this harrowing ordeal -- that story eluded the media until a Specialist had the nerve to turn over that disc with the horrible photos at Abu Ghraib and until Seymour Hersh and "60 Minutes II" found their way to the "big story."

The "next story" resides in a multitude of stories that were nearby, close at hand, but were simply missed because it is customary to be entranced by awful events and miss the underlying causes that led to them.