About those photos

[pecunium]

There has been a lot to be dissapointed/worried about in the past week about things which the administation's done, which are at odds with what the candidate said. One of those things is the photos which haven't been released from Abu Ghraib.

The reasons everyone are giving are either 1: Politics as Usual (i.e. Obama doesn't want more heat from the Right, so he's caving in/leaving the actual call to the courts so he has deniabilty), and 2: To Protect the Troops.

If it's either of those things I'm disappointed. The first is craven. Part of the reason the Right gets away with stuff is the polticians let them (and The Press engourages them. Just look at all the pundits running around saying it's nice to see Obama acing like a grown up by not caving into the radicals at the ACLU). If Reid, Obama, et al. were to stand up to them a bit more, then they wouldn't have deal with this as much (though The Press would still be bending over backwards to prove to the Right that they aren't Obama's lapdogs, and they still like the Republicans).

If it's the second I think it's wrong. Will there be an uptick in violence when those photos are made public? Probably. Can't be helped. There are a lot people who are, justifiably, pissed off (I am not saying they are right, per se to be attacking US Troops, but walk in their shoes a bit; if it was happening here, you'd be pissed off. Some people would be violently pissed off. What's happend in Iraq; even if our motives were ever so pure, is infuriating).

Some of those people are angry enough to do violence.

I think, however any such violence would be a spasm.

Not releasing them however, keeps a lot the people who are seething, at a simmer. All it takes is a little something to bring them to a boil (and there are lots of petty indignities to make up that little something, it doesn't have to be a big thing).

If we air that dirty laundry, admit to what happened, a lot (perhaps most) of that will go away.

In the long run, I think keeping those pictures secret is going to cause more violence than it might seem to prevent.

There is, however, a third reason. It's possible the administration doesn't want to taint evidence in actual prosecutions relating to the photos.

That would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

(n.b. There are a couple of other things going on. The ACLU's Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] request was for fewer photos than are being discussed now. Under Bush the Pentagon had agreed to release photos not included in the FOIA request. A lot of the accussations of Obama breaking a promise are about those photos. Those photos may be of greater use in ancillary prosecutions than the ACLUs requested photos)

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Does "It's not the crime, it's the cover up" have no specific meaning to Obama's team? I could photoshop something hideous, claim it's in the photos, and what's he going to do?

Al Qaeda can buy a copy of photoshop just as easily as I can.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about reason three too. I sure hope that's the real reason.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

There is, however, a third reason. It's possible the administration doesn't want to taint evidence in actual prosecutions relating to the photos.

There's talk that Obama is letting other parties force him every step of the way on this to avoid accusations of a political witch hunt. I hope the tainting evidence point is the true one. I hope this resolves the way it needs to.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'll try to reserve most of my indignation for a few weeks, but will eventually release it if we don't find out that those photographs are being used as evidence in the prosecution of a large number of people -- including those well up in the Chain of Command. And preferably including the Commander In Chief. And yes, the talk is of "at least 2,000 phographs". Eventually, the details of all of them, and any others that come to light, will need to be released, if only so we can know just how widespread the shameful acts depicted was allowed to be.

This particular scandal was Mr. Bush's, and he should be held accountable.

If there is now a cover-up, that will be considered Mr. Obama's responsibility, and we need to hold him accountable.

Frankly, the way the Current Administration apparently is continuing to follow the policies of holding some people indefinitely without trial, claiming a right to subject some of them to treatment that can reasonably be considered cruel and inhuman, and/or of holding show-trials in which the defendents do not receive the rights of Common Law does not encourage my hopes.

If we do not demonstrate that we subscribe to the spirit of -"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"-, an important light will be gone from the world.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

2000 photographs as evidence maybe doesn't mean so much in these days of digital cameras, but if they can be dated, and cover a long period, it pretty well wrecks any claim of momentary failure. And if there's a uniformity of what's happening, oh boy, is it going to make the idea of rotten apples look silly.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, and if they involve different perpetrators, at various places, it gets even worse. Assuming, that is, that these c. 2,000 are all of them. And then, without limiting evidence, there's always speculation which might be more horrible than reality. (Those disappeared videos of Interrogations probably are part of an Official cover-up, most likely.) Are we dealing with, e.g., sodomizing children in the presence of their parent(s)? Disrespectful treatment of the corpses of people who died under torture? Sadly, there appear to be indications that we are -- or ought to be.

And yes, as Terry says, there _will_ be unfortunate & unpleasant repercussions. That happens when people do things they shouldn't do, and I think the best way of minimizing them is open investigation and prosecution -- with more than slap-on-the-wrist punishment of a few grunts.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think some of those scenarios are impossible, but I daren't.

And if it's getting into that level of war crimes, the potential of awareness seems to be spread much wider through the military. As a soldier, you might have been able to cope with the revelations of what mighrt have happened to the guy you arrested, who was shipped to Abu Graibh. But if orders had come to detain whole families and ship them off, and your example comes out... Prejudicial to good order and military discipline hardly seems adequate as a starting point to describe the reaction.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think that our Military would, to put it bluntly, refuse to obey orders to do horrible things, but I daren't.

In fact, our Military appears to have a significant-enough-to-be-frightening number of people who _want_ to do things like that, and more who'd probably come around to it if the atmosphere were right. Not many, yet, I hasten to say, but I'm afraid they're not as rare as they used to be. And the Military -- with its awareness of the importance of The Rules of "Civilized" Warfare -- is probably better in this than our civilian population is. *sigh*

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I think every military has a significant number of such people. I am not sure our present army is all that bad (though the present recruiting difficulties seems to be changing that, at least a little).

Give a bunch of young men weapons, training in how to use them, and license. Add that up and you have a potential for brutishness. Toss them into a place where their is lots of violence, and no clear sense of purpose, cause, or victory, and the odds are bad things will happen.

This, I think, is the real reason for officers being told the enlisted are base. Not that they are any more base, by nature, than any other group of people, but because people are base, and the sense of being "above" the baser nature gives the officer an anchor to keep that baseness from being induldged.

It might also be that telling the troops that officers are "better" makes it more likely they will be able to restrain those excesses.

I don't know the military is, "better", I do think they have more mechanisms for preventing the "worse" from happening, but are more capable of being terrible once they commit to being "uncivilised".

[stringmonkey.livejournal.com]

There's a fourth reason not to publish the photos: that of the privacy rights of the torture victims. In this country, we do not release photographs of the victims of rape, domestic abuse, or other forms of violence that demonstrate the humiliation and suffering visited upon them by their abusers. This remains true whether the victim is an innocent child or a convict serving a life sentence. Why should it be any different for the victims of torture?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

That's not completely true. I've seen lots of reports (esp. at/of trial) which publish such photos.

We also have the means to keep the people in the photos from being identifiable.

On a purely cost/benefit basis there are some real problems. Hiding them (from the reports I'm seeing; from places abroad, as well as people commenting on reaction abroad) is doing more harm than good. The lack of knowledge is allowing people to believe the worst.

That's a problem for the victims too. People will think they were abused in ways they may not have been; and make all the negative assumptions which go with it.

It's a problem, no matter how it's sliced.

[stringmonkey.livejournal.com]

At trial? Sure. At that point, as you say, they constitute evidence and should be made available. But the only reasons I can see for doing it now are either political or prurient.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Politics is not, ipso facto bad motives. The political motives I was talking about (repercussions in the wider world) are not trivial.

They are also not base, nor purely related to what happens to Americans. If publishing them leads to less violence in Baghdad, that's to the good for more than just soldiers.

If they lead to more people in the States being angry enough to push for more serious investigation, that's also to the good.

And those are both, "political" reasons.

[yuripup.livejournal.com]

I hate the fact that Obama has flipped on the photos.

It's the basest triumph of pragmatism over ideals and dangerous to our democracy.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yup. The Military are like the Police -- faced with violence (or the idea of it) day-to-day, and trained to (necessarily) usually respond with violence. Both have controls to help prevent them from getting too far out-of-line (the Military have better ones, I think), but if or when they Go Bad things can get very bad indeed. Civilian control of the Military is one of the "safeguards", but it tends to break down if (or when) the civilians at the top are lacking in scruples, ideals, and imagination, or are excessively Politicized (as, I think, has happened during the recent eight year Administration, and might not be much better with the current one).

Maintaining the Officer Corps as a kind of Aristocracy (with _Noblesse Oblige_ and an acute sense Honor) has worked fairly well for the U.S. but power and money both tend to corrupt, and I think the Pentagon/Military-Industrial Complex needs to have a sharper eye kept on it than we've been doing.

One of the best (though imperfect) safeguards is (to use a current buzzword) transparency -- public awareness of what's actually happening. And this depends much on media reporting, the mood of the public, and their ability to distinguish between sometimes-necessary secrecy and secrecy-to-avoid-embarrassment.