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OBAMA'S OTHER MIGRAINE

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WILLIAM FISHER
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Human rights lawyers are proving to be a major headache for the new administration of President Barack Obama by stepping up their court challenges on issues of prisoner abuse to test the reality of the president's pledge to create a "an unprecedented level of openness" in government.

A series of current court challenges illustrates the point.

Five years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request that the Department of Defense release photos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan that the public had never seen. The government refused.

Five years later, in September 2008, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the George W. Bush administration to release the photos. But, as of today, the government has not complied with the court's order. The only record the government has released to date is a set of media talking points used by the State Department.

In early March, the DOD asked for a hearing by the full appeals court. That request was denied. The government then asked for a 30-day stay of the court's mandate.

That prompted ACLU lawyers to write to the Defense Department, asking the government to reconsider its position and release the photos in light of President Barack Obama's executive order. The Defense Department has not yet replied.

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU's National Security Project, told us,  "The Obama administration's commitment to transparency is commendable. "We want to make sure that this rhetoric becomes reality."

ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, who argued the case in court, added, "The American public has the right to view these images to know what was done in its name."

"Release of the photos would send a powerful message that the new administration truly intends to break from the unaccountability of the Bush years," she said.

The government refusal to disclose these images is based on its attempt to radically expand the exemptions allowed under the FOIA for withholding records. The government also 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."

Much of what the public knows about U.S. treatment of prisoners has been learned from the more than 100,000 pages of government documents obtained in response to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit.

Attorney General Eric Holder recently issued comprehensive new FOIA guidelines that direct all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA.

In another case, in 2003, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace, filed a FOIA request to the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the CIA, to immediately process and release all records relating to treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.

When the government failed to respond, the organizations filed a lawsuit charging that these government agencies illegally withheld records concerning the abuse of detainees in American military custody.

Their complaint noted, "Photographs and videos leaked to the press have established beyond any doubt that detainees held in Iraq have been subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. The government has conceded that numerous detainees have died in custody; at least sixteen of these deaths have been classified as homicides. There is growing evidence that the abuse of detainees was not aberrational but systemic, that in some cases the abuse amounted to torture and resulted in death, and that senior officials either approved of the abuse or were deliberately indifferent to it."

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William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now (more...)
 
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