Why Obama is Fighting to Keep the Detainee Abuse Photographs Secret

Detailed descriptions of the photographs has been publicly available click here on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union for nearly five years. The documents describing the photographs were part of separate reports prepared in May, August, and July 2004 by the Army's Criminal Investigative Division (CID) into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A female soldier who appeared in one of the 44 photographs that was set for release told CID investigators that she did not remember why the Iraqi prisoners in the photograph she appeared in were "flexicuffed to the bars...and have sandbags covering their heads," but "detainees were put in that stress position either because the interrogators felt that the detainee could provide further intelligence, or because the detainee was a disciplinary problem." She said the detainees weren't placed in that position for the photograph but were "already there when we decided to take the picture."

The female soldier who appeared in the photo testified, "The other interrogators and I did not have a lot of work to do for a couple of days. Myself and several other MPs... were fooling around in the prison, and SGT [redacted] took several photographs."

The soldier said "everyone" was taking pictures and he was unaware of a "no picture" taking policy. "It was always an [military interrogator] call to zip-tie them and put them in certain positions."

The documents in the case also includes a sworn declaration from former Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers click here warning that releasing the photographs to the ACLU would threaten national security and could lead to the deaths of American servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan, a line Obama has now echoed.

Sanchez, the retired senior U.S. Military officer in Iraq, said in a new afterword to his book "it's now clear the Bush administration did not tell the truth about the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, or in Afghanistan and Iraq."-

"As a matter of fact, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, administration officials worked diligently to deflect responsibility away from them and down to military leadership on the ground," Sanchez wrote. "It is also apparent that the White House and the Department of Defense consistently attempted to minimize any further exposure of their actions and, specifically, to prevent a serious investigation into their executive-decision making process."

Sanchez said, "in order to prevent this from ever happening again," the Obama administration and Congress "must conduct more comprehensive investigations across all involved agencies, learn from the findings, and implement permanent changes. Only then can we hope to restore America's moral authority."

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3  |  4

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).