Defense Department to Release Detainee Treatment Photos

April 24th, 2009 By: Michael van der Galien | Tags: , , , , , ,
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attacks‘The Department of Defense — on the heels of the firestorm over the release of Bush-era memos on CIA interrogation techniques — said Thursday it plans to make public at least 44 photos depicting potentially abusive treatment of detainees at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ Fox News reports.

The decision to release the photos was announced Thursday in a letter filed in a federal court in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 2004.

It sets a May 28 deadline for the Department of Defense to produce 21 images that the court in 2006 ordered the government to release and 23 additional related images, as well as “a substantial number of other images” in the Army’s possession.

The images were part of the military’s investigation of potential abuse of detainees by U.S. personnel at facilities other than Iraq Abu Ghraib, though the photos apparently aren’t as shocking as those that set off a prisoner abuse scandal in 2004, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Although it may make sense to publish these photos for domestic reasons, defense officials (probably rightfully) worry that they could set off a backlash in the Middle East against the United States. Things have calmed down in especially Iraq now, with the far majority of Iraqis opting for peace and democracy rather than extremism and (civil) war.

If these photos would do anything threaten the positive developments outlined above, the department may consider keeping them from the public for a few years more.

Openness and honesty are essential in a liberal democracy, but there is a time for everything: there is no need to endanger international relations (because if the photos are inflammatory people in the entire Middle East could raise hell) if publishing them a few years from now also enables us to know what happened and why.

My take on this is probably quite unpopular, but I truly do not see why Washington should give anti-Americans in and outside the Middle East even more material to work with. Let it be. What happened, happened. If we are so determined to find out what took place exactly, let us wait until times have changed and the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq are less prominently in the news and on people’s minds.

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