Among the millions of words that have appeared in the U.S. press since late April about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing:

racism.

Overall, when it comes to racial aspects, the news coverage is quite P.C. – as in “Pentagon Correct.” The outlook is “apple-pie egalitarian, with the media picture including high-profile officers who are African American and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of the cameras to personify Uncle Sam in blackface.

The U.S. government doesn’t drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington’s geopolitical agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the war process easier, when the people being killed and maimed aren’t white people. An oversized elephant in the media living room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public: The United States keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble people who often experience personal and institutional racism in the United States.

In the American media coverage of the uproar after the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3rd: “So far, the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over.”

Media denial lets the U.S. military – and the U.S. incarceration industry – off the hook. Yet it’s significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib crimes. Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, “had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections,” according to Seymour Hersh’s article in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently “were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.”

That knowledge came from working as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has 2,033,000 people behind bars – 63 percent of them black or Latino. With racial minorities vastly over-represented in federal and state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class.

A public-interest group, The Sentencing Project, notes that “black males have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 percent chance and white males have a 6 percent chance.” Most of the people sentenced to prison are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent guests.

The same government that runs this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia and Haiti. In 1999, a major U.S.-led bombing campaign caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden missile strikes hit Libya and Sudan. And U.S.-funded military forces on several continents—from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala to Angola to Indonesia—took many lives.

Generally, with the exception of Serbs, the victims of Pentagon firepower have been people of color who look different from the USA’s white majority and power structure. In the United States, racial biases have helped to grease the war machinery.

We may want to view the large number of Latino and black GIs as reassurance that U.S.warfare is race-neutral. But the decision to launch war is hardly democratic. Soldiers, by definition, follow orders that result from the political process: skewed by the inequalities of power and the effects of prejudice.

Trying to calm outrage by speaking to viewers of Arabic-language television on May 5, George W. Bush said the people of Iraq “must understand what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know.” But as governor and president, he has rebuffed every plea to ameliorate the flagrant injustices and brutalities inside the courtrooms and prisons of Texas and the entire country.

Bush “knows”—or at least publicly admits to knowing—only what he wants to acknowledge.

While the Bush administration did little but yawn about evidence of torture and other abuses of Iraqi people at the hands of America occupiers, such disinterest was largely replicated in the U.S. news media. “Ever since the war began, Amnesty International has been receiving reports of Iraqis who have been taken into detention by Coalition Forces and whose rights have been violated,” said an Amnesty International press release dated March 18. “Some have been held without charge for months. A number of detainees have been tortured and ill-treated. Virtually none has had prompt access to a lawyer, their family or judicial review of their detention.”

A statement from an independent credible source that some of the U.S. military’s prisoners “have been tortured” would seem to cry out for a quick response in the form of journalistic exploration. But the statement conflicted with thousands of new stories that—one way or another—portrayed American troops as heroic and humane. It was easy for U.S. news editors to ignore what Amnesty International had to say.

Norman Solomon is co-author, with foreign correspondent Reese Erlich, of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.