Congress Bans Release of Abu Ghraib and Other Torture Images

The scandal in 2004 was the torture itself: American troops and contractors photographed and filmed torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners, many of them innocent, at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. The scandal was yet another unraveling of the Bush administration's sham in Iraq--preaching rights and liberties while crushing both.

The scandal since, besides the further revelations of abuse and torture in Afghanistan, secret prisons and Guantanamo Bay, has been the Pentagon's attempt to censor or ban further releases of embarrassing images. In 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union sued, under the Freedom of Information Act, to force the release of all such images. A federal district court ruled in favor of the ACLU. The Appeals Court for the Second Circuit upheld the decision in September 2008.

Then Congress intervened to legislate the ban. It's about to do so. The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate agreed on a proposal to give the Pentagon authority to ban the release of torture photographs or other images, in any medium, produced at Abu Ghraib, other prisons and any other circumstances involving American soldiers or contractors working for the U.S. government. The sweeping ban would be a unique exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, giving the military the power to decide what images to ban and for how long.

The rationale? Disclosure of such images would allegedly "endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States."

That's bunk of course: the lives endangered aren't the abstract ones listed in the law, but of the victims of torture. Banning the release of such evidence is a way of hiding the evidence, evading accountability, encouraging recurrences, all under the guise of "protecting" Americans.

While seeking to protect Americans from themselves--from some of their most craven deeds--the law, which covers any torture or abuse images (or any images the Pentagon deems covered by the ban) going back to Sept. 11, 2001, is giving cover to the sort of thing that ought to be associated only with the lowest of the low. And it leaves dangerously vague the breadth of the Pentagon's authority. The Abu Ghraib images were shot by soldiers but on their private devices. What happens to the next whistle-blower who films or photographs degrading and illegal acts committed by members of the military or civilian contractors employed by the military or the U.S. government, and releases them to the media? Would that whistle-blower, should he or she be a soldier or a government contractor, be contravening the law the moment the Pentagon declares those images beyond the ken of the Freedom of Information Act?

Just one of the many unanswered questions of a law as shameful as the acts, many of them still unknown and unpublished, it seeks to whitewash.

See Also:

• Text of Law Banning Release of Torture Photos
• Abu Ghraib: The Actual Photographs
• Complete Guide to the Abu Ghraib Torture Photo Scandal
• Pros and Cons of Releasing Torture Photos
• Obama's Abu Ghraib Photos Flip Flop