The US must release photographs showing abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, a federal judge has ruled in a clash over letting the world see likely disturbing images of how the US military treated prisoners.
US District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s ruling on Friday gives the US government, which has fought the case for more than a decade, two months to decide whether to appeal before the images would be released.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been seeking to make them public in a bid to hold the government accountable.
Photo: AFP
The US Department of Defense is studying the ruling and plans to make any further responses in court, spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Myles Caggins III said.
ACLU representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday night.
The ACLU has said the pictures “are manifestly important to an ongoing national debate about governmental accountability for the abuse of prisoners.”
The legal battle over the photographs reaches back to the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it invokes the images of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that sparked international outrage after they emerged in 2004 and 2006.
It is unclear how many more photographs might exist. The government has said it has 29 relevant pictures from at least seven different sites in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it is believed to have perhaps hundreds or thousands more, Hellerstein said in a ruling in August last year.
Some photographs, taken by service members in Iraq and Afghanistan, were part of criminal investigations of alleged abuse.
Some show “soldiers pointing pistols or rifles at the heads of hooded and handcuffed detainees,” then-solicitor-general — now US Supreme Court Justice — Elena Kagan wrote in an appeal to the high court earlier in the case.
The government has said that releasing the photographs could incite attacks against US forces and government personnel abroad, and officials have said that risk has not abated as the US military role in Iraq and Afghanistan lessened.
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