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Late Monday, Senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham threatened to use a filibuster to shut down the Senate if legislation they sponsored blocking the release of all photographs showing U.S. Soldiers abusing prisoners is stripped from the Iraq/Afghanistan war supplemental funding bill.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Graham and Lieberman said releasing the photographs would serve "no purpose" at all. They demanded that their colleagues support the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act, which would effectively grant power to the Secretary of Defense to block release of prisoner abuse photographs for a period of three years.
Both cases mark an about-face on the open-government policies that President Obama proclaimed during his first days in office.
On Jan. 21, he signed an executive order instructing all federal agencies and departments to "adopt a presumption in favor" of Freedom of Information Act requests and promised to make the federal government more transparent.
"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."-
But it's becoming increasingly clear that after the disclosure of several Justice Department "torture memos" in April and the backlash that ensued, Obama is desperately trying to avoid further criticism from Republicans by continuing the Bush administration's era of secrecy.
And like George W. Bush, Obama has already made the mistake of blaming the abuses in the photographs on a select group of soldiers as opposed to the policy decisions passed down by his predecessor.
"The individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken," Obama said in a statement click here last month explaining his decision to withhold the prisoner abuse photographs. "It's therefore my belief that 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."However, a bipartisan report released earlier this year by the Senate Armed Services Committee said the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere was not the work of a "few bad apples," as the Bush administration and Obama have asserted, but was the result of policies enacted by President George W. Bush and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Obama's statement directly contradicts the conclusions of the Armed Services Committee report.
The report said the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other US run prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq was not the result of "a few bad apples." Rather, it was policy decisions handed down by the Pentagon to senior military officials and military interrogators and eventually reached prison guards.
In fact, court documents in the five-year-old case make that much clear.
Interviews with many of the soldiers who appeared in the photographs conducted by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division said Special Forces out of Fort Bragg was in charge of operating the military facilities where the photographs were taken and they had never provided soldiers with any written guidelines on how to handle detainees and in some cases egged them on.
In addition, soldiers interviewed said Special Forces Psyops and military interrogation teams authorized them to "play loud music and keep detainees awake if the interrogators wanted them to."
One soldier said they "kept the detainees awake by holding them up or by playing the loud music," the report noted. The soldier said Special Forces instructed soldiers that prisoners who were "violent or had information" were "flex-cuffed on their hands, heads covered and not allowed to sleep."
Sleep deprivation, which is what the soldier appears to be describing, would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions ban on cruel and inhumane treatment and underscores how the Bush administration's interrogation policies trickled down to low-level soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
