Abu Ghraib and Salon

By continuing to publish documentation of the abuse, we hope to shed light on a chapter in American history that this administration has tried to keep in the shadows.

By Joan Walsh

Feb. 18, 2006 | In the wake of our publication Wednesday evening of photos from Abu Ghraib prison that had not previously been available to the public, Salon's readers have raised several issues that we'd like to address. The most important of these are: Why did we publish this material when we did? Was Salon somehow "sitting on" this material? And why didn't we publish everything we have?

We received a voluminous archive of Abu Ghraib materials a week before we published our story. With help from our news team, investigative reporter Mark Benjamin began the careful process of vetting what his source provided and determining what we had that was new and not simply duplicates or near-duplicates of images already available to the public.

This process took several days. As we were digging into the archive, the Australian television news show "Dateline" published its own Abu Ghraib file, with many, but not all, of the photos we were busy cataloging.

It's tough to be scooped, but it's tougher to live with the result of making bad judgment calls under the gun of a deadline. We accepted the risks posed by our choice not to rush to publish what we had without vetting and authenticating it, even after the Australian photos ran. We also realized we had two assets the excellent Australian report did not: some unique and disturbing photos of abuse, but maybe more important, documentation of what many of the photos depicted in the Army's own Criminal Investigation Command (CID) report -- information that allowed us to provide informative captions with our photos.

So we set out to create a photo portfolio that provided context for all the images shown. Our goal was to publish newsworthy images that hadn't been widely seen before, providing the best information that the CID investigation materials could offer.

In the end we published 18 photos. We ruled out photos that depicted horrific scenes that we couldn't be sure were the result of abuse -- while disturbing, certain subsets of images might be photos of people who arrived at the prison dead or injured, who were injured in the course of a battle and not during interrogation or torture.

We felt that the 18 photos we chose represented a cross section of the types of psychological and physical abuse known to have occurred at Abu Ghraib -- in particular, sexual humiliation. The photos depicted almost routine nudity, along with many instances of male prisoners with their faces covered by women's underwear, as well as arguably the most disturbing image of the group, the scene of an allegedly mentally deranged prisoner apparently sodomizing himself with an unidentified object.

For now, there are two criticisms we'd like to answer. One is the suggestion from some readers that we should put the entire archive on our Web site. Another is the provocative, though I think disingenuous, demand that if we're willing to inflame Muslim sentiment with this awful photo gallery, then we should have also hosted -- and should now immediately publish -- the Danish cartoons of Mohammed that spread riots and violence throughout Europe and the Muslim world.

Let's take the last argument first, since I was bludgeoned with it by Tucker Carlson on MSNBC's "The Situation" Thursday night -- and, more important, since some of our readers are asking the question sincerely. I'm enormously proud of our coverage of the Danish cartoon controversy. We were among the first U.S. news organizations to give it significant attention, and from our very first story, we linked to Web sites hosting the cartoons in question, as we typically do with samples of media that have come under fire.

We're not a newspaper; we're a creature of the Web, and the cartoons are easily accessible in our world. We linked early and often, we got criticism for even linking, and meanwhile we covered the story from every imaginable angle: an interview with passionate Dutch legislator and Muslim reformer Hirsi Ali, who defended the cartoons and insisted they be shown everywhere; a nuanced examination of the politics behind the Jyllands-Posten decision to run the cartoons, by a liberal Danish intellectual; a tough analysis by Juan Cole; reporting from the streets of Morocco.

Next page: Cartoons are cartoons; the photos are real

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