Article: EXCLUSIVE: Documents Describe Prisoner Abuse Photos Obama is Withholding

For instance, last September in upholding a lower court ruling ordering the release of the photos, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit noted that past U.S. administrations had championed the release of photos that showed prisoners of war being abused and tortured.

Notably, after World War II, the U.S. government publicized photos of prisoners in Japanese and German prisons and concentration camps, which the court noted, "showed emaciated prisoners, subjugated detainees, and even corpses. But the United States championed the use of the photos as a means of holding the perpetrators accountable."

The Bush administration's legal arguments were rife with other examples of hypocrisy, including an argument that release of the photos – even with the personal characteristics of detainees obscured – would violate their privacy rights under the Geneva Conventions.

The irony was that the Bush administration - with the help of legal opinions drafted by Justice Department lawyers - had maintained that detainees from the war in Afghanistan and the larger "war on terror" were not entitled to prisoner of war protections under the Geneva Conventions.

Indeed, an action memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, opened the door to abusive treatment by declaring that the Third Geneva Convention, which sets standards for treatment of prisoners from armed conflicts, did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda and that Taliban detainees were not entitled to the convention's legal protections.

The ACLU argued that the Bush administration's legal strategy was "surprising because there would be no photos of abuse to request had the government cared this much about the Geneva Conventions before the abuses occurred and the photos were taken."

In disputing the administration's selective application of these international standards, the ACLU noted "the Geneva Conventions were designed to prevent the abuse of prisoners, not to derail efforts to hold the government accountable for those abuses."

Federal courts agreed with the ACLU's arguments. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals deemed the Bush administration's position legally flawed and added that releasing "the photographs is likely to further the purposes of the Geneva Conventions by deterring future abuse of prisoners."

The appeals court also shot down the Bush administration's attempt to radically expand Freedom of Information Act exemptions for withholding the photos, stating that the Bush administration had attempted to use the FOIA exemptions as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy."

The Obama administration has until June 9 either to reargue the case before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York or to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review the matter.

Copyright © 2008 The Public Record. All rights reserved.

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