WASHINGTON — A month after making public once-classified Justice Department memos detailing the Bush administration’s coercive methods of interrogation, President Barack Obama on Wednesday chose secrecy over disclosure, saying he would seek to block the court-ordered release of photos depicting the abuse of detainees held by U.S. authorities abroad.
Obama agreed less than three weeks ago not to oppose the photos’ release but changed his mind after viewing some of the images and hearing warnings from his generals in Iraq and Afghanistan that such a move would endanger U.S. troops deployed there.
“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,” Obama said Wednesday. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.”
Civil-liberties and human-rights advocates asserted the reversal would serve to maintain the Bush administration’s legacy of secrecy.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Obama’s shift was “deeply disappointing.”
“Even given that the photos will undoubtedly generate outrage in the region, the best way to dampen that outrage is to hold those responsible accountable,” Roth said.
The photos were assembled as part of about 200 criminal investigations conducted before the disclosure in 2004 of widespread prisoner abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib, the former Iraqi prison that the U.S. military turned into a detention and intelligence-gathering center.
Previously released pictures taken at Abu Ghraib — depicting Iraqis stacked naked in piles and pyramids, tormented by dogs, chained to beds, and placed in other painful or humiliating positions — enraged many in the Middle East and became symbols of a deeply unpopular U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iraq.
But no commanding officers or Defense Department officials were jailed or fired in connection with the abuse, which the Bush administration dismissed as the misbehavior of low-ranking soldiers.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request in October 2003 for all photos pertaining to U.S. military detention operations. It filed a lawsuit the following year after the initial request was denied.
Last September, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the photos released. The Bush administration challenged the ruling, but the court denied that petition in March.
Amrit Singh, the ACLU lawyer who argued the case, said the court ordered the release of 21 photos taken in Afghanistan and Iraq, outside of Abu Ghraib. She said 23 other photos taken in undetermined locations are part of the lawsuit. Civil-liberties advocates say that as many as 2,000 other photos could be subject to release.
“There’s a substantial number of photographs about which we know nothing,” Singh said. “All we know is that some of them depict prisoner abuse.”
In an April 23 letter to Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York, the Obama administration stated that “the parties have reached an agreement that the Defense Department will produce all the responsive images by May 28, 2009.”
Press secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday that Obama had not viewed the photos at that time.
Last week, Obama gathered White House lawyers and informed them he did not “feel comfortable” releasing the photos because it could provoke a backlash against U.S. troops, administration officials said.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff, said the administration had been informed that the time to challenge the release had passed. He said Obama had also been informed that the Bush administration had challenged the photos’ release only on law-enforcement and privacy grounds, and had never invoked a national-security exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.
“That’s a big fact when you are commander in chief,” Emanuel said. “When you have a window that you were told had been shut that is still open, an argument that’s never been made, and a secretary of defense who is telling you that your commanders on the ground are concerned, you make this decision.”
At the end of the meeting, Obama directed the lawyers to prepare a challenge to the photos’ release. He informed Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, of his decision at the end of a Tuesday meeting at the White House.
Gibbs said Obama has seen a representative sample of the photos, which the president described Wednesday as “not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”
But one congressional staff member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the photos, said the pictures are more graphic than those that have been made public from Abu Ghraib.
“When they are released, there will be a major outcry for an investigation by a commission or some other vehicle,” the staff member said.
