"The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears," Obama's order said. "In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."
Though Obama's Justice Department did maintain some of the Bush administration's "war on terror"- legal positions, Obama ordered government lawyers to stop Bush's battles against Freedom of Information cases which sought to expose evidence of torture and other abuses.
Last month, in releasing four Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005--which created a legal framework for torturing terror suspects--Obama said that withholding them "would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time."
Obama also announced that he would not fight a federal appeals court ruling ordering the Defense Department to turn over photographs of prisoner abuse. He made that decision, administration officials said, because the White House did not believe it could convince the Supreme Court to review the case.
Change of Course
But Obama changed course Wednesday. In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein, acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin said "we have been informed today that, upon further reflection at the highest levels of government, the government has decided to pursue further options regarding" a decision it made April 23, to release the photos.
Then, speaking to reporters, Obama said, "the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger."
Obama added that the photographs "are not particularly sensational."
Obama's reversal marks a renewal of U.S. hypocrisy regarding the abuse of detainees and the hiding of evidence about such crimes.
For instance, last September in upholding a lower court ruling ordering the release of the photos, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit noted that past U.S. administrations had championed the release of photos that showed prisoners of war being abused and tortured.
Notably, after World War II, the U.S. government publicized photos of prisoners in Japanese and German prisons and concentration camps, which the court noted "showed emaciated prisoners, subjugated detainees, and even corpses. But the United States championed the use of the photos as a means of holding the perpetrators accountable."
The Bush administration's legal arguments were rife with other examples of hypocrisy, including an argument that release of the photos--even with the personal characteristics of detainees obscured--would violate their privacy rights under the Geneva Conventions.
The irony was that the Bush administration--with the help of legal opinions drafted by Justice Department lawyers--had maintained that detainees from the war in Afghanistan and the larger "war on terror" were not entitled to prisoner of war protections under the Geneva Conventions.
Indeed, an action memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, opened the door to abusive treatment by declaring that the Third Geneva Convention, which sets standards for treatment of prisoners from armed conflicts, did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to the convention's legal protections.
The ACLU argued that the Bush administration's legal strategy was "surprising because there would be no photos of abuse to request had the government cared this much about the Geneva Conventions before the abuses occurred and the photos were taken."
