Lift the veil

He’s wrong.

Barack Obama is wrong.

The president should step aside and allow the release of photographs detailing the type of treatment detainees received at the hands of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said releasing the photos now could put our troops in greater danger. How? It’s not like al-Qaeda doesn’t already know what we did. Hell, they probably know more about what happened in those dank cells better than any of us do. After all, they were there. We’re still over here, still being kept in the dark by our own government.

The photos that were to be released, before Obama ordered his lawyers to argue more forcefully against it, "are not particularly sensational, especially when compared with the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib," he said.

You remember those photos. Naked men, forced to pile on top of one another in a human pyramid while smiling soldiers stand behind them. A hooded man, with wires attached to his genitals. A hooded man with a military dog snarling in his face. A naked man with a military dog snarling in his face. A naked man with a pair of underwear for a hood. Blood smears on the floor where someone hurt badly was dragged away. A dead man packed in ice with a U.S. soldier smiling and giving a thumbs up sign by his body.

Yes, those were pretty damned “painful images.” The new ones weren’t as bad, Obama tells us, “but they do represent conduct that did not conform with the Army conduct manual.”

Conduct that was AOK under the Bush administration, but banned by Obama. The Americans shown in the photos abusing prisoners have already been dealt with, the president said.

The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them would be to further inflame anti-American opinion, and to put our troops in greater danger.

And that’s where he’s at his most wrong. Those who hold extreme anti-American opinion don’t need any photos to inflame their positions. And our troops are already in great danger.

But most of all, the photos would greatly add to our understanding of the type of conduct that was not only allowed but encouraged by the Bush administration. Carried out “by a small number of individuals?” Maybe. But it wasn’t their idea in the first place.

But Obama’s already let us know he’s not interested in pursuing the real perpetrators of this heinous behavior. Maybe he doesn’t want to listen to the Republicans accuse him of “criminalizing policy decisions,” as if that is even remotely what’s going on.

Criminalizing policy decisions would be seeking to prosecute members of the Bush administration for refusing to participate with the U.N. Human Rights Council. That may be stupid, but it isn’t criminal.

Abusing prisoners -- especially when you already know that many of your prisoners may not be “terrorists” at all, but farmers and cab drivers teachers who pissed off somebody who then fingered them to the U.S. military as al-Qaeda members –- is criminal.

We need to see what they did, how they treated human beings. We’re not even talking about “high value detainees” who were tortured. That’s a different matter, and we need to see and hear about that too.

And the president needs to stop perpetuating the myth that it was just a few "bad apples" who foisted this barbaric behavior on the American psyche. It wasn't. It came from the top. And if that's not obvious by now -- with Darth Cheney and his little girl Liz all over the airwaves talking about how great it was what we did -- then we are a far more deluded people than I thought.

As long as we keep these things secret, the American people can go on pretending nothing really bad happened to these detainees and that they all deserved it anyway.

No human being deserves to be treated this way, and what happened to them was horrible. All of them, not just the ones who were waterboarded.

It was wrong, what happened to them. And it’s wrong for Barack Obama to keep it from us.


AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

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Peace Y'all