Good for Carol Rosenberg & for Alasdair Palmer

Carol Rosenberg of Knight Ridder Newspapers is one of the vanishingly small number of reporters who have included a crucial sentence in her article on allegations of prisoner abuse by American guards. In this case she was reporting on Amnesty International's criticism of Guantanamo Bay as a 'gulag of our times'.

You can figure out which it is:

The July 2002 FBI report quoted a prisoner as claiming, "The guards dance around when the detainees are trying to pray."

The Pentagon has said in the past that it recovered an al-Qaida manual that shows captured members are taught to fabricate abuse episodes in custody.

The Pentagon says all the enemy combatants at Guantanamo are either Taliban or al-Qaida members, or their sympathizers.

I don't think I've seen the second sentence more than once or twice in a major news service's report in the last couple years. Why not? It seems like basic information readers should be given repeatedly in order to evaluate allegations for themselves. It is at the end, but the wonder is that it is there at all.

Good for Rosenberg, and good as well for her editor for not removing it in the interests of brevity.

In January, Alasdair Palmer did write an article, This is al-Qa'eda Rule 18: 'You must claim you were tortured', for the UK's Telegraph:

The men's claim that they were tortured at Guantanamo should also be set in the context of the al-Qa'eda training manual discovered during a raid in Manchester a couple of years ago. Lesson 18 of that manual, whose authenticity has not been questioned, emphatically states, under the heading "Prison and Detention Centres", that, when arrested, members of al-Qa'eda "must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security investigators. [They must] complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison". That is not, of course, proof that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo. But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were – which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media.

Next, I'd love to see an article about that al-Qaida manual. Given the abuse allegations recently, it would be timely, and help put things in perspective. Give us a picture or two. As I recall it is on the Web (tho I couldn't find it quickly), so why are so few telling us about it?

Why didn't Newsweek mention it?