Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?
By Greg Mitchell Editor & Publisher, May 8, 2008
Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised. On May 10, 2004, an Iraqi human rights official charged that American overseer Paul Bremer had been repeatedly informed about abuses at Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker revealed that Donald Rumsfeld personally okayed a set of procedures that led to the abuses. Several major newspapers called for Rumsfeld to quit.At that time, in a column, I disclosed how Pulitzer-winning correspondent Charles J. Hanley at The Associated Press had actually “broken” the Abu Ghraib story months before it came out via The New Yorker and other outlets—but the rest of the media had paid it little mind. This led me to ask, Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again?
The media was now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they the previous fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge—when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents? “It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source,” Hanley told me.
Continued . . .
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