White House Has Thousands Of Detainee Abuse Photos

For those who think we didn’t torture, or even that torture is acceptable, seeing photos might be a rude awakening. However, it’s not known if photos in possession of the White House will ever be released.

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[su_thin_right_skyscraper_ad]Some photos show American troops posing with corpses; others depict U.S. forces holding guns to people’s heads or simulating forced sodomization. All of them could be released to the public, depending on how a federal judge in New York rules—and how hard the government fights to appeal. The government has a Friday deadline to submit to that judge its evidence for why it thinks each individual photograph should continue to be kept hidden away…

The president may have entered office promising a new era of transparency—and was even prepared to release at least 21 of the photos in 2009. But Obama pulled back at the last minute at the urging of his top commander in Iraq, who worried the graphic images could generate a backlash against U.S. troops…

Some depict U.S. troops posing for “trophy” photos with dead bodies; others, with rifles and pistols held to live detainees’ heads. (At least one soldier serving in Afghanistan tried to excuse his actions by saying he was “joking”; another called the pictures “something cool to remember our time there.”) A third soldier described a different photograph depicting her “as if [she] was sticking the end of a broom stick into the rectum of a restrained detainee.”

A number of these pictures were later revealed to be from the notorious Abu Ghraib detention facility, where U.S. troops famously abused their Iraq captives in the early days of the Iraq War. But the remaining photos are not from Abu Ghraib — they came from investigations into detainee abuse from all around Iraq and Afghanistan.

D.B. Hirsch

D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.