The nation and much of the mainstream U.S. media were stunned by the recent revelations of abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison.
But for Dahr Jamail, the disclosures were no surprise.
Jamail, a free-lance writer from Alaska, for months has been interviewing Iraqis who say they have been abused by U.S. forces and telling their stories in dispatches on alternative news Internet sites, in reports for Pacifica Radio "Flashpoints" and even on noncommercial radio station WHUS in Storrs.
"I started hearing about these abuses when I arrived in Iraq in November 2003," Jamail said this week in a telephone interview from Baghdad, where he's writing for The NewStandard website. "It was the same as what we're hearing now.
"Any journalist on the ground, if you're talking to people, is going to hear these stories."
But even though Amnesty International in July reported torture of Iraqi prisoners, and the International Red Cross for months had been complaining to U.S. officials about abuse it had documented, the story, with the exception of an Associated Press account in November, didn't get widespread national coverage until photographs of the brutality were shown two weeks ago on television and in The New Yorker magazine.
"It was a missed story," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "That Red Cross report is devastating.
"There should have been coverage from the moment we set up a prison. What does the press think it's doing in Iraq - following the war, or following the creation of a new society?"
The difficulty in Iraq, say mainstream reporters who have been there, is that most news organizations can't do both. They don't have the manpower to stay on top of everything happening in what has developed into an increasingly dangerous, complicated and chaotic situation.
"This was occurring at a time when Fallujah was blowing up and [Muqtada al-Sadr's] people were beginning to become a huge problem," said Kevin Johnson, a USA Today reporter who spent much of this spring in Iraq. "Not to make excuses, but you can focus on any one story over there and have your hands full."
When Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt in March announced developments in the investigation into prison abuses, reporters aggressively pushed for more information, and a number made requests for access to Abu Ghraib, Johnson said.
The military denied prison-visit requests and would say only that six soldiers were being investigated in connection with alleged prisoner abuse, including assault, cruelty and indecent acts.
"Then all hell was breaking loose and they went away from the story and never got back to it," said Bill Kovach, chairman and founder of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and former Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"If there was a failure, it was that reporters in the field had more than enough to do to cover the upsurge in Baghdad and all the other violence," said Kovach. "In hindsight, I wonder why more serious alarm bells didn't go off back in the home offices."
Jamail, 35, a sometime free-lancer who usually works as a guide on Mount McKinley, said he had become so outraged at media coverage during the build-up to the war in Iraq that he began saving money to go to Iraq and "cover it myself."
"I felt like the whole war was fought on false pretenses and that corporate media was complicit," he said. "And once the occupation started, there was a lack of coverage of how it was affecting the Iraqis."
During his first trip in 2003, he wrote reports for electroniciraq.net and other anti-war alternative sites, including a story of a former prisoner who had electrocution burns on his feet and head and was in a coma when U.S. forces released him.
"Some innocent people who were being detained were being humiliated - shoes put in their mouths, forced to stand spread eagle at walls for hours, all the way up to really horrendous torture - rapes and beatings," he said. "I was unable to get it run in any major publication in the U.S."
Indeed, major publications are wary of material from alternative websites, "easily dismissing it as propaganda," Jamieson said.
Kovach, however, warned that wholesale dismissal is misguided: "It's always a mistake to dismiss something based on point of view. The problem is with the wealth of information in the system now, how much does it take to break through to say, `Something important is going on here'?"
Jamail returned to the U.S. in early 2004 but was soon back in Iraq with the financial backing of The NewStandard. When the abuse story finally broke, Jamail said, he had mixed feelings.
"I was really glad that word was getting out and everybody around the world would be reading about it, but at the same time, I was really angry. This stuff should have come out months and months ago," he said.
Human Rights Watch in February wrote an open letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressing its concerns about the rights of the estimated 13,000 Iraqi detainees. But Joe Stork, the organization's Washington director of the Middle East division, said it wasn't just the media that failed in ferreting out the abuses.
"We all missed it, in a sense," he said. "Certainly the U.S. government was doing all it could to keep it quiet and I dare say if it hadn't been for the pictures, it still would not have been the story.
"We certainly were hearing reports of mistreatment, including beatings, which can rise to the level of torture. But, frankly, if you read this stuff and you can't verify, it comes down to he said, she said."
The overall issue of treatment of detainees and the military's interrogation techniques have not gotten the attention they deserve, Stork said, from Afghanistan, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Abu Ghraib.
Joshua Rubenstein of Amnesty International said that after 9/11, "the government has been given a lot of leeway by the press and by the public, and they've exploited that."
"I don't think this abuse is an anomalous action - it is completely and disturbingly consistent with this administration's policy," he said. "The press's job is not to be a cheerleader for the government, but to find the truth - whether that reinforces the administration or contradicts it."
Jamieson argues that media organizations should define coverage beats in Iraq broadly enough to allow for coverage of major institutions where power would be wielded - including courts, schools and prisons.
"I suspect that because most reporters are assigned to a specific beat and trying to adapt to a new environment, prisons just weren't part of that," she said. "But they should have broken the story."
Johnson, the USA Today reporter, said he had gone to Abu Ghraib a number of times and had spoken to people being released.
"Some described conditions as very good, that they were treated very well," he said. "The problem seemed to be that [U.S. forces] were scooping up large numbers of people who may have had no business being in prison, and a lot of reporting went into that.
"You could have spent many weeks just on [the prison-abuse issue] alone and advanced the ball down the road a great deal. It's difficult to put the blame anywhere but on the reporters."
