I'm sorry for the brevity of this post but I was watching AC:360 and Anderson Cooper said that the ACLU announced that the Department of Defense will release photos sometime between now and May 28th, depicting POW abuse by American personnel. It will include photos from Afghanistan and Iraq.
The LA Times reports that the Obama administration will release 44 photos in response to the ACLU's FOIA request.
Defense officials would not say exactly what is contained in the photos, but said they are concerned that the release could incite a backlash in the Middle East.
The photos are apparently not as shocking as the photographs from the Abu Ghraib investigation that became a lasting symbol of U.S. mistakes in Iraq. But some show military service members intimidating or threatening detainees by pointing weapons at them. Military officers have been court-martialed for threatening detainees at gunpoint.
http://www.latimes.com/...
Apparently, according to the same LA Times article, this isn't the only information that the Obama administration will release in the coming days:
Additional disclosures to be considered in the coming weeks include transcripts of detainee interrogations by the CIA, a CIA inspector general's report that has been kept mostly secret, and background materials of a Justice Department internal investigation into prisoner abuse.
In each instance, President Obama and his administration are being forced to decide whether to release material entirely, disclose it with redactions or follow the lead of the Bush administration and fight in court to keep the material classified.
Thank goodness for the Freedom of Information Act and the ACLU!! This information will finally see the light of day. I guess we're going to see a drip, drip, drip for the next few weeks if not months. I know the mainstream media and high-level Democrats want to ignore this story, but with all of these revelations, I just don't think we as a nation will be able to hide the truth about this for that much longer.
Just a little background on this story. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request back in 2003 and even filed a lawsuit to get the government to release the photos:
At issue are 87 photographs the ACLU believed were taken by members of the military at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the Abu Ghraib prison that became synonymous with US abuses after humiliating photos from there first appeared in the New Yorker in early 2004.
Although the government stopped trying to fight the full release of Abu Ghraib photos after they all were independently published in 2006, the ACLU says the Pentagon continues to keep hidden 29 additional images from at least seven different locations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
http://rawstory.com/...
In September 2008, The ACLU won their lawsuit in U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which ordered the Bush administration to release the photos.
Since the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2003, the government has refused to disclose these images by attempting to radically expand the exemptions allowed under the FOIA for withholding records. The government claimed that the public disclosure of such evidence would generate outrage and would violate U.S. obligations towards detainees under the Geneva Conventions.
However, the appeals court panel rejected the government's attempt to use exemptions to the FOIA as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy" and recognized the "significant public interest in the disclosure of these photographs" in light of government misconduct. The court also recognized that releasing the photographs is likely to prevent "further abuse of prisoners." In its final months in office, the Bush administration petitioned the full appeals court to reconsider, but to date, no action has been taken.
http://www.aclu.org/...
In related news about the release of the OLC torture memos, the Washington Post's venerable journalist Walter Pincus et al provide a fascinating glimpse into the Obama administration's decisionmaking process for releasing the memos last week. Pincus notes that on April 15th the following:
Seated in Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's West Wing office with roughly a dozen of his political, legal and security appointees, Obama requested a mini-debate in which one official was chosen to argue for releasing the memos and another was assigned to argue against. When it ended, Obama dictated on the spot a draft of his announcement that the memos would be released, while most of the officials watched, according to an official who was present. The disclosure happened the next day.
Obama's aides have told political allies that the last-minute conversation, which ended around 9:30 p.m., demonstrated the president's commitment to airing both sides of a debate that was particularly contentious. But it also reflected widespread angst inside the White House that a public airing and repudiation of the harsh interrogation techniques that the last administration sought to keep shrouded in secrecy would spark a national security debate with conservatives that could undermine Obama's broader agenda.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The Washington Post article also describes the nascent beginnings of President-elect Obama's policy on interrogation of POWs:
Officials say the process of rolling back the controversial policy began shortly before Obama took office, when the president-elect dispatched a half-dozen experts to the CIA for two days of secret briefings in the director's conference room.
Chuck Hagley, Jim Jones and Greg Craig were among those who went to the CIA to investigate whether or not the Obama administration should adopt the army field manual.
During the meetings, then-CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, his deputy Steve Kappes and about 20 other senior CIA officers sought to explain the agency's counterterrorism and rendition programs and to present the best case for retaining the option of reestablishing secret prisons and using aggressive interrogation methods, according to four of those present. Hayden emphasized that the agency had discarded most of the old programs, including the secret prisons, in 2006.
The use of waterboarding ended in 2003, but Hayden said he wanted to keep the flexibility to utilize some of the other, less controversial techniques. Boren and Smith said the group was not convinced that whatever useful intelligence had been gleaned from the programs warranted keeping them as an option.
They said that they had produced valuable intelligence," Smith said. "We took them at their word." But the group's consensus was that "whatever utility it had at the outset . . . the secret prisons and enhanced techniques were no longer playing a useful role -- the costs outweighed the gains." He said those costs included obvious damage to America's values and identity, and problems with U.S. allies that strongly opposed the use of such methods.
I don't want to copy and paste the whole article but apparently our allies were unwilling to turn over suspects because they were afraid of what we would do to them. Again, please read the whole article. Pincus et al (as usual) did a great job with it.