New York: The US must release photographs showing abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge has ruled in a long-running clash over letting the world see potentially disturbing images of how the military treated prisoners.
US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling on Friday gives the government, which has fought the case for over a decade, two months to decide whether to appeal before the photos could be released. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been seeking to make them public in the name of holding government accountable.
ACLU representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday night.
The pictures are manifestly important to an ongoing national debate about governmental accountability for the abuse of prisoners.
-American Civil Liberties Union
The Case
The fight over the photographs reaches back to the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it invokes the images of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that sparked international outrage after they emerged in 2004 and 2006. Early in the 2004 lawsuit, the ACLU pointed to the Abu Ghraib photos as priority examples of records the organisation was seeking on the treatment of detainees.
The government has said it has 29 relevant pictures from at least seven different sites in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it’s believed to have perhaps hundreds or thousands more, Hellerstein said in a ruling in August. He has ruled that any images that would be released would be redacted to protect the identities of people in them.
The government has long argued that releasing the photographs could incite attacks against US forces and government personnel abroad, and officials have said that risk hasn’t abated as the US military role in Iraq and Afghanistan lessened.
The Vice Director (Operations) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a December court filing that the Islamic State “would use these photographs to further encourage its supporters and followers to attack US military and government personnel.”