Judge: public has right to see additional abuse photos from Abu Ghraib

[Sauron]

Most of America has forgotten by now. I can guaran-damn-tee you that the Arab world has not forgot it, though.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...inee_records_1

NEW YORK - A federal judge has told the government it will have to release additional pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, civil rights lawyers said.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein, finding the public has a right to see the pictures, told the government Thursday he will sign an order requiring it to release them to the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawyers said.

The judge made the decision after he and government attorneys privately viewed a sampling of nine pictures resulting from an Army probe into abuse and torture at the prison. The pictures were given to the Army by a military policeman assigned there.

ACLU lawyer Megan Lewis told the judge she believes the government has pictures of abuse beyond the Abu Ghraib images that sparked outrage around the world after they were leaked to the media last year.

Some of the thousands of pages of documents the government has released to the ACLU seem to refer to such images, and the government has not denied that additional photos exist, she said.

The judge decided some pictures from Abu Graib could be released to comply with the Freedom of Information Act while others must be redacted or were not relevant to the ACLU's request, Lewis said.

[Abdul Alhazred]

It's not like there's somebody out there who hasn't heard of Abu Ghraib.

Maybe I'm thinking too sneaky, but aren't these photos evidence in pending criminal cases?

[flopstock]

Yep, god forbid anyone think into the future and just release all of the pictures at the beginning of this atrocity..Nope, let's dribble them out over time so we can treat it like it was just yesterday for the next five years..

[wildernesse]

The use of torture should remain in the public's mind as if it were just yesterday that we heard of it, imo. Our collective attention span is too short.

[flopstock]

Originally Posted by wildernesse

The use of torture should remain in the public's mind as if it were just yesterday that we heard of it, imo. Our collective attention span is too short.

No it's not. Not on everything it isn't. And you're right, it shouldn't be. But there is enough other crap going on day to day that we need to know about, but we won't because this will become the lead story again and all the outrage will heat up again. Any reparations in relationships will be shot to hell and set back to square one. I just wish that once in my lifetime, when the shit hits the fan in our government, someone has the balls to actually say...'here, we're going to disclose everything we know and think we know about this issue'..just once.

And folks wonder why we have no credibility anywhere..

[Clutch Munny]

The release of this stuff in dribs and drabs was carefully calculated. I think, flopstock, you're not taking seriously something that the gov't was correctly assuming: Both the media and the populace want to minimize the torture's significance -- to the point that they will be complicit.

Limiting the initial release made perfect sense, domestically at least, because this made it barely possible to depict the torture as limited, and more insulting than bloodthirsty. Now it's a spent story -- old news -- so no matter how much the new photos reveal, the news sources will justify burying it and Bush voters will find reason to ignore it.

In other words, I don't think that "we" will be treating it like it was just yesterday. I predict that a new round of photo releases will sink like Haliburton stock shorn of government subsidies.

[mountain_hare]

I for one would love to see the photos. I find it appalling that the government can prevent the American people from viewing the photos (I'm Australian, by the way). After all, the government REPRESENTS the people, and serves them. Why should the govt. have a right to know, and not the people who voted them in?

Shouldn't the citizens KNOW that their government is acting responsibly?