With the Koran descration story quickly growing legs, the Downing Street Memo picking up steam, Amnesty International officially—and rightly—lumping us in with torturers, and things continuing to go south in Iraq, the Bush administration can’t be happy that we’re all about to get a look at 100 more pictures from Abu Ghraib.
A US judge has ordered the Bush administration to release more than 100 new photographs and videos of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, creating a fresh public relations nightmare for government officials as they seek to rebut accusations that the US is sponsoring torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
…Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the New York federal court granted a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to release the materials after viewing eight sample photos last week. It is not known exactly what the 144 photographs and videos depict, but they are from the same sources as the graphic images of prisoners being piled up on top of each other, threatened by attack dogs and forced into sexually compromising positions that triggered scandal and outrage just over a year ago.
“These images may be ugly and shocking, but they depict how the torture was more than the actions of a few rogue soldiers,” said ACLU director Anthony Romero. “The American public deserves to know what is being done in our name. Perhaps after these and other photos are forced into the light of day, the government will at long last appoint an outside special counsel to investigate the torture and abuse of detainees.”
Bush adminstration lawyers, laughably, argued that releasing the pictures would violate the right of the detainees under the Geneva Conventions. (Oh, now they care about the Geneva Conventions?) But in the end it didn’t hold much water, and when the ACLU—continuing its heroic work to bring the facts about the abuse to light—argued that the pictures could be redacted by blocking out the prisoner’s faces, the judge agreed.
This fight will probably go on, but I think it’s a small miracle that these photos haven’t been leaked out already. Surely there are some copies out there somewhere, just sitting on a hard drive, waiting to be blasted out into the internet. Either way, it’s only a matter of time before we see them. And, I think, we should see them. After all, it was all done in our name and on our dime.
