you seem to be subscribing to the 'its easier to do it all in one line' approach. don't do that. 

2) compress:    bzip2 -z imagfile.iso -c  > imagfile.iso.bz2

3) send: scp your_username@remotehost.edu:imagefile.iso /some/local/directory/imagefile.iso.bz2

4) decompress : bunzip  imagefile.iso.bz2 

ok, enough wrinkles here that you need to iron out by reading the man pages, I'll