The Telegraph – by Raf Sanchez
The US government is fighting to keep secret thousands of photographs showing American troops abusing and sexually humiliating prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and mocking the corpses of the dead.
The trove of pictures include an image of a female soldier allegedly pretending to sodomise a naked prisoner with a broom and photographs of troops pointing guns at detainees as they lie with hands tied and hoods over their heads.
One week after a Senate report laid bare the scale of the CIA’s covert torture programme, the White House is nearing a critical stage in its legal battle to prevent the release of these photographs.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that releasing the pictures, which were taken between 2001 and 2009, would incite violence against US troops and civilians in the Middle East.
But a federal judge has taken a dim view of that argument and given Mr Obama’s lawyers until Friday to prove that the 2,000 pictures could pose a threat to national security.
If the government is unable to provide sufficient evidence it will be ordered to release the pictures, although the faces of individual soldiers will be blurred out. The nearing deadline was first reported by the Daily Beast.
If the judge rules against the White House its lawyers could decide to appeal and set the stage for a protracted legal battle that may one day be settled in front of the US Supreme Court.
The trove of pictures were largely taken by US troops themselves as they posed with prisoners or corpses and were gathered during the course of 203 military investigations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some of the pictures are from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which became globally infamous after the release of a photograph showing a prisoner with a black hood on his head and electric wires attached to his outspread hands.
Another photo showed a female soldier holding onto a naked Iraqi prisoner using a dog lead.
Mr Obama initially agreed to release additional pictures after taking office in 2009 but reversed course after the Iraqi government warned it could lead to widespread violence.
His secretaries of defence signed orders in 2009 and again in 2012 blocking their release but a judge ruled in August that the orders were no longer sufficient, given that US forces are largely withdrawn from both Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Three years is a long time in war, the news cycle, and the international debate over how to respond to terrorism,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) first filed a lawsuit in 2004 seeking information about abuse of detainees at the hands of US troops.
“The public has a right to know what happened in these military detention facilities in the same way it has the right to now what happened in the CIA’s secret prisons,” said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.
“If you give the government the authority to suppress information simply because people may react badly to it, then the government is going to be suppressing a lot more.”
Critics of the Senate inquiry into CIA torture warned that its report would leave to violence but the response has so far been muted across the Middle East.
It is possible that some of the US troops pictured in the photographs have already been prosecuted by military authorities, but the ACLU said it was difficult to know without the pictures being made public.
Judge’s order on the release of abuse pictures
The important thing to remember about this torture nonsense is that they could have kept this hidden, and simply refused to report it to the American people if that’s what they wanted to do, just as they’ve done with so many other events.
We only learned about Abu Ghraib because they WANTED us to know about it, and they want us to know about it so we’ll learn to accept it.
Torture is only in the news, and in the courts so you become used to it, and won’t raise much of a fuss when kids are tortured for trying to sell lemonade, or owning toy guns.
The “next torture report” will be released like the next episode of any mini-series, and undoubtedly, Snowden will release a few more spying documents so you’ll be afraid to talk about it.
and “photographs show US troops abusing and sexually humiliating prisoners” will insure everyone tunes in to hear all about it, because no one can resist a little pornography between commercial breaks.