Cast of Characters
From American Gulag
Contents |
[edit] Camp Bucca
'On May 12, 2003, a convoy of trucks driven by members of the 320th Military Police Battalion out of Ashley, Pennsylvania, and the 223rd MP Battalion left Tallil Airforce base outside Nazaria in southern Iraq carrying some 44 Iraqi prisoners of war. The mission, which was to bring the prisoners to Camp Bucca, an internment camp that U.S. soldiers had created far out in the desert, was also intended to be a training exercise for the members of the 320th. They had seen action at during the invasion, but they had not been working in a prison setting and members of the 223rd had been instructed to show them how to handle prisoners. The mission was going smoothly as the trucks pulled into Camp Bucca, but when the MPs attempted to herd the prisoners off the bus, there was resistance. It is at this point that accounts begin to differ. According to several members of the 223rd who reported an incident to their superior officers, four members of the 320th were rough with the prisoners. At later court martial hearings these witnesses would recount the screaming of the prisoners as they were beaten and viciously manhandled by the four reservists from Pennsylvania. According to the reservists themselves only necessary force was used, and even then not much--a few Iraqis were pinned to the ground in order to maintain control.
After a Pentagon spokesman announced an initial investigation into the events of May 12, four Pennsylvania Reservists from the 320th Military Police brigade, Lisa Girman, Shawna Edmonson, Scott McKenzie, and Tim Canjar, became the subjects of the first media coverage of abuse in Iraqi prisons and the archetype of a story that would continue to leak out of Iraq for some time. But the coverage of the reservists’ court martial, the findings of the Board of Military Justice and the subsequent rehashing of the story after abuse at Abu Ghraib made headlines is more illustrative of the press's failures in covering the Iraq war than of its successes. The articles about the so-called scandal at Camp Bucca show the surprising ways in which journalists' reliance on official sources and limited knowledge of inter-army politics can damage the accuracy of news reportage.
When the story of alleged abuse at Bucca debuted on July 26, 2003, it did not make many headlines. The source cited in all the published articles was Lieutenant Commander Nick Balice, a spokesman for the US Central Command, announced the story along with the weekly death count. "It could be dismissed." Balice told Matt Kelley, an Associate Press reporter, "It could be some other form of disciplinary action. Or it could a court-martial. It all depends on the determination." Kelley's story ran that Saturday, in varying forms, in USA Today and the Washington Times. Most papers printed reworked versions of this original wire story. The major national newspapers stopped running stories about a week later when it became clear that the court martial, and any sort of resolution, was months away. Only smaller circulation Pennsylvania newspapers pursued the story. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a story in early September reporting the four soldiers' claim that they had become the victim of a vendetta by their commanding officers for having expressed concern over the daily functioning of the base. On Saturday November 16, 2003, the four officers were arraigned. This reinvigorated reporters’ interest. The New York Times ran an article three days later in which Eric Schmitt, a staff writer assigned to Washington bureau, described the charges more specifically: In an arraignment at an Army base in Kuwait on Saturday, three members of the 320th Military Police Battalion of Ashley, Pa., were accused of kicking and punching Iraqi prisoners that they were taking to a camp near Basra on May 12, Army officials said Tuesday. Then the Pentagon did not have anything more to report. As CNN’s Andrea Koppel concluded after a brief report on the arraignment; "we have got to wait a couple months to see the outcome of those three individuals' fate." When, the following January, the court martial was canceled and the officers were given a non-judicial punishment and sent home, the AP wrote a brief story and the Atwater Florida News Press wrote a story about Sgt. McKenzie's mother, a local resident. Otherwise, the press took no interest in the soldier’s punishment--perhaps because they had been deemed neither innocent nor guilty and no longer made compelling subjects. The stories would only be revived in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal that erupted that spring..
The coverage of the Camp Bucca four, as the reservists came to be known, brakes down into four sets of stories. First, there is the cluster of stories written after the Pentagon announcement in July, 2003; second there are the stories surrounding the arraignment and court martial; third there are the few clips covering the sentencing; and finally there are the stories that performed the post-Abu Ghraib re-hash. Of these stories the only set of articles not riddled with inaccuracies is the first set based on the AP story by Matt Kelley. The wire story was thorough, accurate and presented no statements or evidence that seems retrospectively incorrect. But the three other article varieties warrant a thorough post-mortem as they illustrate, in turn, an ignorance of military justice procedures, an overzealous pursuit of scandal, and finally a profound selection bias coupled with a misunderstanding of military documents and sources.
[edit] Arraignment and Court Martial Stories
Covering the military can be difficult because its judicial system, while governed by the same philosophical principles as the domestic court system, works in fundamentally different ways. While a court martial might seem to be the military parallel to a domestic trial, it is a very different beast. Reporters tendency to gloss over the differences between civilian and military trials, in both their own reporting and their articles, clearly accounts for some mistaken reports and can lead towards biased coverage. Compare Erik Schmitt’s description, in the New York Times, of the potential penalties of the court martial; "If convicted, they would each face up to more than 20 years in prison, loss of pay and a dishonorable discharge," with David Caruso’s AP story describing a "disciplinary hearing that could lead to an acquittal, a simple letter of reprimand, or a recommendation that they be discharged from the service or imprisoned." Schmitt was working with Pentagon sources. Caruso was covering letters advocating on the soldiers behalf sent by Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter(R) to the Department of Defense. A reader, having perused the Schmitt story, would conclude that a serious crime had likely been committed. Readers of the Caruso article would probably conclude quite the contrary. This is not to say that either story is incorrect, but rather that the reporters' reliance on different sources for explanations of the terms of a court martial greatly affected the nature of their coverage. The reporters' discomfort with the Military Code Of Justice is clearly evident in their language, which is highly unspecific in both cases. This is an example of reporters soliciting official interpretations of military procedure and receiving responses that diverge for political reasons. These articles also are hurt by the reporters' lack of contact with the actual subjects of their article. The reason for this absence is not mentioned in either article.
By the time the Times and the AP were covered the arraignment, the four reservists had been put under a gag order, were working in Kuwait and did not yet have a lawyer to speak on their behalf. While the AP recycled the old story—received second-hand through state-side relatives—that the reservists believed themselves innocent, the reservist were not able to speak out about either the specifics of the accusations brought against them or their treatment by the military justice system. The only manner in which the reservists could be quoted was through letters they had sent to their senators and congressman months earlier in which they complained that the allegations against them were false, that their guns had been taken away in violation of military law, and that the camp was poorly managed by officers who using them as scapegoats. Caruso printed a story full of indirect quotes from Scott McKenzie
'Several of the prisoners resisted and had to be wrestled to the ground, McKenzie wrote. One prisoner kicked Girman's leg, and a second grabbed Canjar's wrist and had to be subdued after a struggle, McKenzie wrote...McKenzie wrote that military authorities found no blood on the accused soldiers' clothes, even though the prisoner with the broken nose allegedly was bleeding profusely. '
These letters were being filtered through Arlen Specter, who was eager to assert his connection to Pennsylvania servicemen to counter accusations of liberal tendencies that were costing him votes in a hard fought re-election campaign. While the presence of this side of the story is certainly a good thing, both the lacking interrogation of the indirect quotes and the lacking acknowledgment of the gag order are indicative of a hurried and incomplete reporting process.
These stories reveal the journalists' literal and figurative distance from the story. The details about Camp Bucca are heavily filtered and most of the information seems to have percolated through Army rank and file. In The journalists have done too much to serve the interest of politicians and generals. The query is not deep enough and so the story comes across with some facts, little detail and an astonishingly small amount of context. The reporters might not be culpable—being in Iraq or Kuwait has become both prohibitively expensive and extremely dangerous—but they can be held accountable for, after the arraignment, not quoting the court martial record itself. That record, which documents the charges more deeply and even added conspiracy to the list of charges against the soldiers, would have been a far better source, coupled with the Code of Military Justice, than pointmen in the Pentagon. Either patience in obtaining sources by FOIA request or a deeper understanding of military law is clearly necessary to avoid the creation of such widely divergent accounts of the same story.
[edit] Verdict Stories
London's Guardian newspaper provides an example of everything that can go wrong with a January 6, 2004 article by Gary Younge entitled "US Soldiers sent home for beating prisoners of war" that is premised on a supposed fact provided by a clearly inaccurate source, "Three American soldiers have been discharged after being found guilty of viciously beating and harassing Iraqi prisoners of war, some of whom were already injured, a US military spokesman said last night." The three American soldiers to whom Younge refers, McKenzie, Canjar, and Girman, were never found guilty of anything, they received a non-judicial punishment and were discharged under general, not dishonorable, conditions. Their court martial was canceled and there was never a verdict of any kind. Younge was writing from Iowa, where he was probably covering presidential primaries, and he completely trusted the Army spokesman who, it would appear, lied during a press conference—a story unto itself.
Unfortunately, The Guardian story is one of only a few that covered the outcome, or lack thereof, of the court martial. Another article, "US Discharges Soldiers for Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners," posted by CNN's Barbara Starr correctly reported that the three soldiers received non-judicial punishments but then stated that they had been found guilty of a number of different offenses. It is better than the Guardian but its internal inconsistencies seem almost intentionally misleading. In reality, the soldiers accepted a demotion, loss of a few months pay and a discharge, a punishment that was not explicitly linked to any crime. What happened at Bucca—the tripping of Iraqi prisoners and potentially the throwing of few punches and kicks—may have been abuse or it may have been necessary, there was never a ruling. The press has never been accused of dealing well with moral gray areas Nearly three times as many reporters covered the allegations than covered the non-judicial punishment. The reason for this discrepancy is that headlines sell newspapers and broadcasts. The ambiguous results of the Army investigation did not lend themselves to a punchy line—thus the mis-heading from CNN. One of the few sources to get the story right was the Scranton Times, which used non-military sources, mostly consisting of the reservists’ family members. Clearly a news story that is covered as both a guilty verdict and an acquittal has been confused by an inattentive, confused or headline hungry media.
[edit] The Post-Abu Ghraib Rehash
The stories concerning the Camp Bucca incident that ran in the wake of the Sixty Minutes broadcast of April 30, 2004 revealing the profound prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib represents the worst coverage of the events at Camp Bucca. These stories, which came from many of the nation's leading news sources are full of poor reportage and overzealous conclusions. Legally, many of these articles flirt with libel. The story of Camp Bucca four was reframed by a media hungry for stories of prison abuse. Another story by Eric Schmitt, this time for the May 10 International Herald Tribune included the following telling quote:
"At least one detainee was held down as McKenzie and two other soldiers beat and kicked him, according to testimony in a court-martial. This was done at the urging of a superior, Master Sergeant Lisa Girman, according to the testimony."
At no point in the article does Schmitt mention that the testimony came from a case that was canceled due to a lack of evidence. If he had managed to obtain the court martial transcript, he had not read it thoroughly. If he had not attained the transcript, and this seems more likely, he was relying on a military source. The military sources had come out of the woodwork. As the pictures from Abu Ghraib were printed and reprinted, the Army public relations machine and the soldiers implicated in the abuse went on the offensive, Nick Balice told a press conference that the Camp Bucca four had been found guilty and Jerry Phillabaum, the 320th's commander at Bucca who had also been in charge of Abu Ghraib during the abuses, leaked a private memo from the previous fall detailing the alleged abuse at Camp Bucca and citing the Pennsylvania reservists. In the AP story covering the supposed revelations in the memo, as it ran in USA Today, the memo was described as a "letter from the battalion's commander obtained by the Associated Press" accused the reservists of taking "vigilante justice" against Iraqi prisoners accused of raping Jessica Lynch. The article included denials by the soldiers but also insinuated that the soldiers had been discharged because of culpability, a conclusion hard to draw from actual evidence but increasingly easy to draw from official sources. The article finished with the following paragraph
[General] Phillabaum, who was reprimanded in connection with the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, mentioned the previous abuse at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq in a rebuttal to charges leveled against him in an April report of an Army investigation.
This is a paragraph that certainly gives the reader pause. The editors at USA Today edited out the unsurprising revelation that Phillabaum had leaked the Memo even though the AP writer had been entirely transparent in the original story. This sort of editorial decision illustrates the media's desire to unearth a pattern of prisoner abuse. The editors at USA Today were only too happy to accommodate Phillabaum and the Army’s reconstruction of the events at Camp Bucca so long as it provided new coverage of the scandal in Iraq.
Phillabaum would later be removed from his command, but not before he had managed to inspire several journalists to see the abuse at Bucca as part of a broader pattern of bad behavior by soldiers he was attempting to control. If there was a pattern to be found it was in his consistent incompetence. Only the Baltimore Sun seemed to get that story loud and clear. The Sun's Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Laura Sullivan went to press a few days later than USA Today. They had read The Taguba Report, an audit of abuse in Iraqi prisons written by General Antonio Taguba. Particularly, they had read, and quoted, the part where Phillabaum was described by his superior officer as an "extremely ineffective commander and leader." The article sourced the four reservists’ letters as evidence supporting the allegation that Phillabaum was an incompetent leader. This article was slanted against Phillabaum, but it is accurate. In the time since the Abu Ghraib scandal, Phillabaum's ineffectiveness has become a refrain sung by those seeking to understand how the abuse could have happened.
Reporters, by dealing with Phillabaum as representative of the monolithic structure of the Army, failed to grasp the subtler distinctions necessary to accurately report on the abuses in Iraq. There seems to have been a fundamental failure to conceive of the Army as a massive organization with many, and different, moving parts. The lack of coverage, in early May, of internal struggles within the prison leadership structure, struggles that have been elucidated through subsequent investigative work, indicates editors’ acquiescence to the desire of readers for more salacious stories. To be fair to reporters, some outlets more adept at ferreting out Washington intrigue did their homework. NBC's Dateline filed a FOIA request for all available Camp Bucca paperwork on May 6 (before MSNBC ran the AP "Memo" story). Perhaps curious about conflicting coverage, the Washington Post submitted a similar request, specifying court martial reports, that July.
[edit] The Story of Sgt. Scott McKenzie
Scott McKenzie was a particularly interesting character in the Camp Bucca scandal because, unlike many other reservists, he had been in the Army and seen action in both Bosnia and Kosovo. He was also working as a professional prison guard when he was called up to go to Iraq. Despite the claims of a New York Times story that portrayed him as poorly prepared, Sgt. McKenzie was extraordinarily well prepared to serve as a prison guard in occupied Iraq. McKenzie has now returned to Pennsylvania and to his job at the penitentiary, which attempted to demote him because of the Bucca incident but demured after McKenzie's attorney threatened legal action.
McKenzie lives alone. He suffers from post traumatic stress disorder, which, in his case, largely results in feelings of mistrust for authority figures. He says the case against him by the Army turned his world upside down and that he is no longer capable of being the affable and outgoing guy he once was. He says he avoids going out; even going grocery shopping at off hours. According to him the officers of the 232nd who reported him for abuse had had a similar complaint lodged against them before the Bucca incident and were eager to distract attention from themselves. He says they lied during the court martial and his claim seems to be supported by the evidence.
In the court martial one of these soldiers testified to having heard screaming like he had never heard before, while the wording of his complaint against the reservist said that they had been "a little rough." McKenzie says the court martial was canceled because of these sorts of inconsistencies between the CID report and actual testimony. Without the judge's papers it is impossible to confirm McKenzie’s claim. What is absolutely clear, is that the case was extraordinarily complicated, involved many moving pieces and was treated with no subtlety by an eager press. McKenzie doesn't fault the press. He didn't like the New York Times articles, and he wasn't allowed to see clippings while being held in Kuwait, but he has no apparent resentment for the reporters who covered and mis-covered his ordeal. He only resents the army and his superior officers. He has recently been talking to high school students near where he lives in Clearfield. A lawyer with the program that offered him the chance to speak says he talks openly about the ordeal and stresses the importance of honesty to the kids he meets.
[edit] Conclusion
Only a handful of people know whether or not Scott McKenzie intentionally shoved a man to the ground, twisted his broken arm and kicked him in the head and testicles—but millions think that they do. There are problems with the reporting technique when it comes to the military and there are problems with the media's deadline orientation, but perhaps the biggest problem is the media's failure to express and embrace ambiguity. While the doctrine of sourcing is admirable and strong, when it comes to covering places where reporters cannot go and events they cannot document, there needs to be a more effective way for writers and editor's to express their own confusion. If the press is going to attempt to cover a situation as complicated as Iraq, there must be a means for reporters and editors to tell their reader's that they do not know. The confident expression of incorrect information is far worse that the less than confident expression of all the information.
