Medhaj News: Would the release of 10-year-old detainee abuse photographs, such as one depicting US soldiers pointing a broom handle at a hooded detainee's rectum, incite terrorist organizations and threaten national security?

That's a question government attorneys will have to answer next week when they explain to a federal court judge why as many as 2,100 unclassified photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi and Afghan captives should continue to be concealed from the public.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case, which resurfaced last week, is part of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) long-running lawsuit against the US government to obtain documents about the treatment of detainees in custody of the CIA and military.

Last week, US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein scheduled a hearing on the matter for September 8 and said "the government has failed to submit to this Court evidence supporting the Secretary of Defense's determination that there is a risk of harm," Hellerstein said, "and evidence that the Secretary of Defense considered whether each photograph could be safely released."

Barack Obama inherited dozens of George W. Bush-era open-records lawsuits pertaining to Bush's post-9/11 interrogation program involving CIA prisoners and the treatment of detainees by US military personnel at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama, who signed an executive order — one of his first acts as president — promising to usher in a new era of transparency and open government, had to decide whether his administration would fight various federal court rulings ordering the release of highly sensitive documents that laid bare the brutality of the treatment of detainees.

He acted on that pledge. In April of that year, Obama released memos written after 9/11 by a young Justice Department attorney named John Yoo authorizing the CIA to subject high-value detainees to 10 so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," a euphemism for torture. (This was also in response to the ACLU lawsuit.) Obama explained that withholding the documents "would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time." The release of the memos was sharply criticized by Republican lawmakers and former CIA officials who asserted that the release would endanger the lives of US soldiers and other US personnel working abroad.

But it did not result in a single reported threat to US interests or military personnel.

About a month later, Obama indicated he would not defy a March 2009 ruling by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld a lower court's decision ordering the Bush administration to release the 2,100 photographs to the ACLU. Obama said he made the decision because the White House did not believe it could convince the Supreme Court to review the case.

The new president was pilloried by Republicans and right-wing media outlets, along with and by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, who accused Obama of "siding" with "terrorists" and questioned whether he "really cared" about US soldiers.

Responding to the criticism, Obama said the photographs "are not particularly sensational."

Medhaj News accessed some photographs from US sources, on the condition that these cannot be published before decision over them in US Courts. However we are describing a few:

• In one photograph, three soldiers at the St. Mere Forward Operating Base in Iraq posed with three Iraqi detainees who were zip-tied to bars in a stress position, fully clothed, with hoods over their heads. Army investigators also found that a soldier possessed a photograph of himself pointing what appears to be a pistol at an unidentified [prisoner], whose hands were tied and his head covered laying down.
• Another photograph captured the corpse of a dead Afghan national who was shot to death by US soldiers in January 2004. The Afghani was believed to be responsible for a rocket-propelled grenade attack on Fire Base Tycze that seriously wounded three US soldiers.
• More than a dozen other photographs, Army criminal investigative reports say, show US Army soldiers in Afghanistan pointing assault rifles and pistols at the heads and backs of hooded and bound detainees, and soldiers kicking and punching detainees.
• In interviews with Army criminal investigators, the soldiers said they intended to keep the prisoner abuse photographs as "mementos" to recall their deployment in Afghanistan.
• Another photograph shows a female soldier holding a broom, she testified to Army investigators in April 2004, "as if I was sticking the end of a broom stick into the rectum of a restrained detainee." A month earlier, this soldier sent an email to an undisclosed number of soldiers in her unit. She said she discovered that the photograph she appeared in had been widely disseminated and that she was under investigation.
One soldier replied to the email by attaching a copy of the photograph and wrote, "I can't see how they think this is anything but fun."