BOB GARFIELD: On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union released thousands of pages of Pentagon documents detailing series abuse of Iraqis by their American captors. None at Abu Ghraib, but at other, out of the way detention centers in Iraq. The allegations include severe beatings, forced sodomy, electric shocks, cigarette burns and murder, and in some cases they're backed up by sworn testimony from civilian contractors. The Army says it has aggressively investigated all credible abuse allegations, but the documents suggest otherwise, and the ACLU charges the Pentagon with turning a blind eye, or worse.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Agree or disagree, you have to give the group credit for uncovering the records. It wasn't easy. The ACLU first filed the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA requests, for the records well over a year ago, and finally had to go to court to get them released. Now the story is getting some coverage in newspapers, if not TV, and that prompted Eric Umansky, who surveys the papers for Slate, to observe that (quote) "Over the past month, the biggest scoops in the news business have come from an organization that's not in the news business." Eric joins me now. Welcome back to the show.
ERIC UMANSKY: Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So how was it that the ACLU managed to scoop big media on this story?
ERIC UMANSKY: Well, unlike three of the four papers that I contacted, they actually filed a FOIA, which helps. And they also filed a FOIA long ago, in the fall of 2003, which is-
BROOKE GLADSTONE: The ACLU?
ERIC UMANSKY: That's right. Which is to say, before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why didn't the media?
ERIC UMANSKY: Well, I, I think the media didn't because it hadn't yet been codified as a sort of important story, but there were ample opportunities to file. In other words, there's a reason that the ACLU made a FOIA request back in the fall of 2003. There were reports - not completely confirmed, not photos, but well-documented reports about abuse, about beatings in Afghanistan. There was one piece in the Washington Post in December of 2002 that referred to different types of humiliation, keeping people naked. There was a sort of famous quote from an unnamed officer saying "If you're not violating prisoners' rights some of the time, you're not doing your job." What were the ramifications? Did it end up going on cable TV? Did it end up getting followed up? No. It was a one day story.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So then you have those horrifying photos. Did that spur the media to action? Did they file their requests then?
ERIC UMANSKY: I think it actually largely did spur them to action in a general sense. There was a lot more investigation of it. Now, did it spur the news organizations to file FOIAs specifically? Mostly, no. Some of the reporters and editors I spoke to said - Wish we had done that. And some of the people I spoke to weren't so willing to kind of fall on their swords and pointed very strongly to the Bush administration's current recalcitrance towards FOIAs.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How does that express itself?
ERIC UMANSKY: Well, the attitude of the Bush administration towards FOIAs is essentially: When in doubt, don't let it out. And that means you have to go down a long, potentially costly path in order for a FOIA to be successful, particularly when it comes to national security. There could be a delay involved, and then you might have to - you're likely in fact - to go to a lawsuit, and a lawsuit costs a lot of money; you need to get your publisher involved. You need institutional backing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Whereas if you're the ACLU, you've got plenty of lawyers.
ERIC UMANSKY: That's right. You've got plenty of lawyers. That's your job - to go to court.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, along with the help of the courts, the ACLU did manage to get thousands of pages of internal records, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we have a clear understanding of what happened in those prisons.
ERIC UMANSKY: Yeah, in, in fact, far from it. It's almost like kind of magnetic poetry. You have intense redactions - a lot of whiteout, basically. I came across, for example, one series of documents that was four pages long. It was a thread of emails, the subject head of which was: Re potential torture of Iraqi detainees. The only thing that was not blacked out was that subject header.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: All four pages were blank?
ERIC UMANSKY: It was completely blank. There was one that also refers to FBI agents complaining about, quote/unquote "a coverup" at Guantanamo Bay. Most other things in the document are blacked out. It's just impossible to figure out what that means.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So just a random phrase here and there does not a story make. Now, obviously here we have a heap of new documents, and for the Abu Ghraib scandal, we had a bunch of very powerful photographs. Most people get their news from television. You read the papers. How do you think the coverage has differed?
ERIC UMANSKY: Yeah, I, I think it hasn't turned into the same sort of media storm as the Abu Ghraib scandal. You know, randomly redacted documents are not as evocative as photos of people on leashes, and the ACLU, frankly, has tried to be a little bit savvy in their PR strategy about it. Rather than taking - I don't know how many there are - say there were 5,000 documents and just sort of dumping them and saying, here you go - here's our big scoop - what they've done is they've released a portion at a time, and each time kind of put a little narrative to it. You know, the latest time they've said, "Our narrative now is that the Army investigations," --which is what a lot of these documents come fro --"were incomplete and half-hearted." They could have said that about evidence from previous papers. They're focusing on it now, cause it's a new angle, frankly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what have been some of the previous angles?
ERIC UMANSKY: The previous angles had to do with the sort of widespread nature of the abuse; special units, commando units being involved in abuse. Things like that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Is it at all comforting to you that, with or without media attention, the documents show that it was the military itself, after all, that initiated investigations into what actually happened?
ERIC UMANSKY: You know, frankly, it is sort of nice to see. What gives me pause is that, because of the level of redactions and because we're only seeing - we're still not seeing all the documents - it's hard to paint a full picture. How many of the alleged abuses were there actually investigations of? How many of the investigations went to fruition, and what were the details of what happened and any court martials therein? It's just hard to figure out that stuff.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Eric, thank you very much.
ERIC UMANSKY: Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Eric Umansky sums up what the major papers have to say each day in the Slate.com column Today's Papers. [MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, what young people don't know about the internet, and a grownup swallows a heaping helping of kid commercials.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
