On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided to postpone its decision on whether the Obama administration can continue to block the release of pictures of the torture of detainees in U.S. custody.  Unfortunately, this now means that we may never see these pictures as the Obama administration and Congress have collaborated to circumvent the courts.  They seem to have agreed on the passage of a law that will put these photos into the hands of the secretary of state, which would effectively remove the courts from the entire equation.

“The administration’s about-face ‘makes a mockery’ of Obama’s campaign promise of greater transparency and accountability, and damages efforts to hold accountable those responsible for abusing prisoners,” said the ACLU.

President Obama was originally not against the release of the photos but in May reversed his opinion.  He stated that he thought the release of the photos could further incite violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, since we are already fighting wars in these countries and deal with violence against our troops there everyday, there is probably more to this claim.  One of the real reasons President Obama might want to withhold the photos from the public is the fact that some of them may depict rape and sexual assault of the detainees.

The final reasons the Obama administration might want to keep this photos hidden is that these photos cover more prisons than just Abu Ghraib, displaying that prisoner abuse was and possibly is a widespread problem in U.S. detainee prisons.  This would potentially create a larger public outcry than the first round of photos and lead to greater speculation of past and current treatment of prisoners being detained by the U.S. government.

Tags: Barack Obama, detention, Supreme Court, torture

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.