US PRESIDENT Barack Obama is seeking to block the release of 44 photographs showing the abuse of detainees in US military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, which his administration had told a federal court could be published later this month.
In a dramatic policy reversal, the White House said yesterday the president now believes that releasing the pictures could endanger US national security.
“Last week, the president met with his legal team and told them that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the DoD [Department of Defence] photos because he believes their release would endanger our troops, and because he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court,” a White House official said. “At the end of that meeting, the president directed his counsel to object to the immediate release of the photos on those grounds.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sought the photographs’ release under the Freedom of Information Act and a federal appeals court ruled last year that the Bush administration could not use the danger of retaliation against US soldiers to withhold them. Last month, Mr Obama’s justice department said it had decided not to appeal that ruling to the Supreme Court.
“The parties have reached an agreement that the Department of Defence will produce all responsive images by May 28th, 2009,” the justice department said in a letter to US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein on April 23rd.
Civil liberties campaigners, who have been demanding a full investigation into the abuse of detainees under the previous administration, condemned Mr Obama’s about-face. “The reversal is another indication of a continuance of the Bush administration policies under the Obama administration,” lawyer Amrit Singh said.
“Obama’s promise of accountability is meaningless, this is inconsistent with his promise of transparency, it violates the government’s commitment to the court. People need to examine these abusive photographs . . . officials need to be held accountable.”
Yesterday’s decision came as the Senate judiciary committee began hearings into the Bush administration’s authorisation of “enhanced interrogation techniques” in legal memos released earlier this year. David Luban, a legal ethics expert, described the memos written by the White House Office of Legal Counsel as “an ethical train wreck” that ignored every lawyer’s obligation to tell his client the truth.
“The memos cherry-pick sources of law that back their conclusions, and leave out sources of law that do not,” he said. “They read as if they were reverse engineered to reach a pre-determined outcome: approval of waterboarding and the other CIA techniques.”
Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda operative the CIA subjected to waterboarding 83 times, told the committee that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were ineffective. Mr Soufan said that Mr Zubaydah gave up a great deal of valuable information when traditional, non-coercive interrogation techniques were used but clammed up as soon as harsher methods were applied.
Legal professor Jeffrey Addicott cited the European Court of Human Rights ruling in Ireland v United Kingdom (1977) in support of his argument that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush administration did not constitute torture under US or international law. The court ruled that five techniques used by British authorities against detainees in the North constituted “inhuman and degrading treatment” but did not rise to the level of torture. The five techniques – wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep and deprivation of food and drink – were similar to some of those approved for the CIA.
The British did not, however, use waterboarding – the harshest technique approved by the Bush administration. Lindsay Graham, the ranking Republican on the committee, agreed that the British techniques may not have constituted torture but suggested that they were none the less counterproductive. “The British . . . turned the people of Northern Ireland against them,” he said.
