DoD set to release abuse photos

[osage18]

We will see if anyone steps in on the behalf of the troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Why Americans in the ACLU would knowingly and willingly put the troops that defend them in harm's way like this is beyond me. This will be a major recruiting and propoganda tool for our enemies in both Iraq and AFG, just like Abu Ghraib.

I wrote my Representative and both Senators and asked them to do something about this, if they can.

Lawmakers Urge Obama to Fight Release of Photos of U.S. Detainee Abuse
The Pentagon plans to release the photos by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
By Catherine Herridge
FOXNews.com
Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Some lawmakers are questioning the wisdom of releasing hundreds of photos potentially showing U.S. military personnel abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

"If we release the pictures, the odds are that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups will then use our pictures to recruit people to come into the war against us," Sen. Joe Lieberman. I-Conn., told FOX News.

The Pentagon plans to release the photos by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The move comes after the Justice Department lost its latest round in federal court and concluded that any further appeal probably would be fruitless.

But critics of the move say it will become a sequel to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, which caused an international backlash against the U.S., with photos in 2004 of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with detainees, some naked, being held on leashes or in painful positions.

Lieberman and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., urged President Obama in a letter to "fight" the release of the photos.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was noncommittal about the president's position.

"We are working currently to figure out what the process is moving forward," he said.

Asked if that means the decision could be reversed, Gibbs said, "I don't want to get into that right now."

Whether the new photos are as repugnant as those from Abu Ghraib is still an open question. But one U.S. official told FOX News that hundreds of photos are involved, drawn from military investigations into alleged abuse between 2001 and 2005.

A recent military study found a troubling connection. The study, based on the interrogation of 48 detainees, concluded that a motivating factor for bombers was the humiliation of Muslims, depicted in the photos shown repeatedly in the Arab media and on the Internet.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News' Neil Cavuto that the Obama administration appears to be "committed to putting out information that sort of favors their point of view in terms of being opposed to, for example, enhanced interrogation techniques."

The head of the American Legion warned in the Wall Street Journal that "a picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth the death of a single American soldier?...The Defense Department owes it to the soldiers to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in order to block the release of these photos."

The ACLU claims the release will help the American people decide whether the abuse was widespread or, as the Bush administration claimed, bad acts by rogue actors.

"The people in the pictures are guilty, but it does not stop and it is dangerous for us to assume that this is just a few bad apples," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the group. "This was at the highest levels of the U.S. government, a policy of state-approved torture that the U.S. committed and carried out throughout the Bush administration."

Lieberman told FOX News the release of the photos is not about transparency because the photos are old and Congress has moved aggressively to prevent abuse in the future through the Detainee Treatment Act.

"This is voyeurism," he said. "There's no value to these pictures and again, tremendous potential harm to American and a lot of Americans, particularly those who are good enough to serve us in uniform."

Lawmakers Urge Obama to Fight Release of Photos of U.S. Detainee Abuse

[Dreadnought]

Pictures not to be released.

CNN) -- President Obama has ordered government lawyers to object to the planned release of additional detainee photos, according to an administration official.

The Iraqi Ministry of Justice gave journalists an inside look at the prison formerly known as Abu Ghraib.

The Defense Department was set to release hundreds of photographs showing alleged abuse of prisoners in detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The release is in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. It follows President Obama's decision to release Bush-era CIA documents showing that the U.S. used techniques like waterboarding, considered torture by the current administration.

Photographs released in 2006 of detainees being abused and humiliated at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq sparked widespread outrage and led to convictions for several prison guards and the ouster of the prison's commander.

The Pentagon shut down the prison in the wake of the scandal, but it reopened under Iraqi control this year.

The ACLU said the Pentagon had agreed to release a "substantial" number of photographs by May 28. Officials at the Pentagon have said the photographs are from more than 60 criminal investigations between 2001 and 2006 and show military personnel allegedly abusing detainees.

"The disclosure of these photographs serves as a further reminder that abuse of prisoners in U.S.-administered detention centers was systemic," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project. "Some of the abuse occurred because senior civilian and military officials created a culture of impunity in which abuse was tolerated, and some of the abuse was expressly authorized. It's imperative that senior officials who condoned or authorized abuse now be held accountable for their actions."

ACLU attorney Amrit Singh adds that the photographs "provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib."

But Pentagon officials reject ACLU allegations that the photos show a systemic pattern of abuse by the military.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Defense Department has "always been serious about investigating credible allegations of abuse."

"The policy of the Department of Defense is to treat all prisoners humanely, and those who have violated that policy have been investigated and disciplined," he added.

Senate report: Rice, Cheney OK'd CIA waterboarding
Lawsuit on alleged prisoner abuse can move ahead
More than 400 people, Whitman said, have been disciplined based on investigations involving detainee abuse. The discipline ranged from prison sentences to demotions and letters of reprimand.

The Pentagon wanted to prevent the images from being put into the public domain but decided to release them after losing two court cases, according to Whitman.

"We felt this case had pretty much run its course," he said. "Legal options at this point had become pretty limited."

Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressed concerns about the photo release, saying that terrorist groups like al Qaeda could exploit the photos to recruit terrorists or incite violence.

It's a sentiment echoed by two veteran U.S. senators. In a March 7 letter to the Obama administration, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, expressed concern over the new photographs.

"We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on Al-Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib," the senators wrote. "Releasing these old photographs of detainee treatment now will provide new fodder to Al-Qaeda's propaganda and recruitment operations, undercut the progress you have made in our international relations, and endanger America's military and diplomatic personnel throughout the world."

Andrew McCarthy, writing on the Web site of the National Review, issued a harsh warning Tuesday: "American soldiers, American civilians, and other innocent people are going to die because Pres. Barack Obama wants to release photographs of prisoner abuse."

"The photos at issue won't tell us anything significant about prisoner abuse, and they may very well serve to distort reality. What seems certain is that they will get Americans killed," he added.

David Rehbein, the national commander of the American Legion, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week that nothing good can come from the release of the photographs.

"Other than self-flagellation by certain Americans, riots and future terrorist acts, what else do people expect will come from the release of these photographs?" he asked.

But group such as Human Rights First have argued in the past that releasing photographs of alleged abuse is vital.

The group, in a release on its Web site, says it has set up a nonpartisan inquiry to "evaluate the full cost of abuses, look at how we got there, and come up with safeguards so we don't repeat the same mistakes."

"The U.S. needs to invest in a forward-looking strategy on intelligence gathering that gives interrogators training and guidance on which techniques work, and which techniques -- such as torture -- don't."

*I wonder why the change of heart so sudden.:));)

[Dreadnought]

WASHINGTON (AP) - In a reversal, President Barack Obama is fighting the release of dozens of new photos showing U.S. personnel allegedly abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a White House official said Wednesday.

Obama's decision came after the top military commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan told the president they feared the release of the photos could endanger their troops.

Obama decided he did not feel comfortable with the release and last week instructed his legal team to challenge it in court, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the president's decision had not yet been made public.

Obama has instructed administration lawyers to make the case that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court, the official said.


The president informed Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, of his decision during a White House meeting on Tuesday.

Gen. David Petraeus, the senior commander for both wars, had also weighed in, as had Gen. David McKiernan, the top general in Afghanistan. Gates fired McKiernan on Monday for unrelated reasons.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said military "commanders are concerned about the impact the release of these photos would have for the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq," and that Defense Secretary Robert Gates shares their concerns.

In Afghanistan, release of the pictures this month would coincide with the spring thaw that usually heralds the year's toughest fighting. Morrell also noted the release as scheduled would come as thousands of new U.S. troops head into Afghanistan's volatile south.

Federal appeals judges have ruled the photos should be released.

Through an arrangement with the court, the Pentagon was preparing to release, by May 28, two batches of photos, one of 21 images and another 23. The government had also told the judge it was "processing for release a substantial number of other images."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the government for the release, criticized the decision.

"The decision to suppress the photos is profoundly inconsistent with the promise of transparency that President Obama has made time after time," ACLU lawyer Jameel Jaffer said.

The Obama official said the president believes that the actions depicted in the photos should not be excused and fully supports the investigations, prison sentences, discharges and other punitive measures that have resulted from them. But the president does not believe that so publicizing the actions in such a graphic way would be helpful.

;)

[osage18]

WASHINGTON (AP) - [B]In a reversal, President Barack Obama is fighting the release of dozens of new photos showing U.S. personnel allegedly abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a White House official said Wednesday.

Good move by the CINC

[Dreadnought]

Good move by the CINC

IMO, Just glad he listened to reason from the men in the field instead of the politics between the two administrations and who would choose what methods at which time. The hard part is that if investigations do take place the men and women that followed orders may be held accountable to the politics of today instead of the politics that were in place at the time. Either way there are guilty parties on both sides of the isle not withstanding.