For some time now, the ACLU has been suing the government for access to photos that document detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush administration's argument against revealing the documents was truly Orwellian; despite a previous court's ruling that redacting the photos would adequately address privacy concerns, the Bush administration argued that "The privacy rights of these detainees are informed by the Geneva Conventions, which protect detainees from, inter alia, public curiosity." In other words, the Geneva Conventions, that "quaint" treaty which the pictures showed the U.S. violating, were to be honored only when it served the government's purpose of obscuring violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Today, the ACLU is still fighting for access to those photos, and they sent a letter to the Department of Defense today reiterating their request for access. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the Bush administration to release the photos, but the administration asked the court to rehear the case, but the court has not made a decision yet and the Obama administration has not yet taken a position.
“The Obama administration's commitment to transparency is commendable,”Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, said in a statement. “We want to make sure that this rhetoric becomes reality.”
Indeed, the court rejected the Bush administration's rationale, and it's hard to see how preventing the release of the redacted photos protects anyone other than the previous administration. But given that the Obama administration is defending John Yoo, attempting to get civil litigation brought by Jose Padilla thrown out of court, it's not impossible to imagine them taking a similar position to the prior administration.
-- A. Serwer
