JURIST - Hotline: Decision to suppress detainee abuse photos keeps public in dark about misconduct

Alexander Abdo [Legal Fellow, National Security Project, American Civil Liberties Union]: "Historically, the United States has championed the use of photographic evidence of human-rights abuses to advance the cause of justice. The reason is simple: Pictures have a unique ability to transform public debate. They convey in plain and unadulterated form what words cannot. It was the video of the Rodney King beating, for example, that exposed to the country the racial tensions lurking in Los Angeles. It was the photograph of the mutilated body of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till that helped spur the civil rights movement. And it was the iconic picture of a man, hooded, wired, and balanced on a cardboard box, that signaled to our nation that our counter-terrorism policies had strayed far from our core values.

But now, to our profound disappointment at the American Civil Liberties Union, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to abandon that tradition and keep from the American public potentially hundreds of photographs of abuse by American soldiers. His stated concern is that the photos, if released, will inflame anti-American sentiment and thereby endanger our national security. Secretary Gates should reverse course and release the photos.

The images at issue depict the abuse of detainees held by the United States abroad in at least seven different detention facilities throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. They are critical to a full and informed understanding of the interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration. They document systemic abuse at a wide range of facilities and would serve to rebuke the myth, recently repeated by President Obama, that rogue soldiers are responsible for the mistreatment. And, perhaps most importantly, the pictures would illustrate in ways no words could the depraved consequences of the Bush administration's unlawful detention and interrogation regime.

These photos would certainly be disturbing, as they should be. And no one wants to endanger our troops. But the Secretary is wrong to suppress the images. In rejecting the same argument when made by the Bush administration, an appeals court noted that the risk that release of the photographs would endanger our troops is "speculative," and the possibility that it would endanger any particular solider is "miniscule." The court's analysis should sound familiar, because it was President Obama who declared on his second day in office that information should not be suppressed based on "speculative or abstract fears."

The more fundamental problem with the Secretary's rationale, however, is that it is unbounded and would justify the greatest suppression of the worst governmental wrongdoing. To prevent inflaming anti-American opinion, the government would have to suppress all evidence of torture and any discussion of Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib. That fundamentally antidemocratic equation – greatest suppression of the worst misconduct – would forever keep the public in the dark about the facts most important to representative democracy and informed decision-making.

Secretary Gates should reject that distorted conception of American transparency - that evidence of misconduct may be suppressed precisely because it powerfully documents governmental misconduct - and release the photographs of abuse. The sooner we publicly acknowledge and investigate our past abuses, the safer, freer, and stronger our country will be."