This is about to get ugly, and we’re only on the tip of the iceberg here folks…

Judge: Public Has Right to See Abuse Photos

NEW YORK (AP) - A federal judge has told the government it will have to release additional pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, civil rights lawyers said.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein, finding the public has a right to see the pictures, told the government Thursday he will sign an order requiring it to release them to the American Civil Liberties Union, the lawyers said.

The judge made the decision after he and government attorneys privately viewed a sampling of nine pictures resulting from an Army probe into abuse and torture at the prison. The pictures were given to the Army by a military policeman assigned there.

ACLU lawyer Megan Lewis told the judge she believes the government has pictures of abuse beyond the Abu Ghraib images that sparked outrage around the world after they were leaked to the media last year.

Some of the thousands of pages of documents the government has released to the ACLU seem to refer to such images, and the government has not denied that additional photos exist, she said.

I don’t know how to temper what I’m going to say, so I’m just going to come out and say it.

The US population has an absolute right to see whatever the military is doing in its name around the world. If there are horrible abuses and torture going on at Abu Ghraib, the US citizenry has a right and an obligation to know about it and to have the opportunity to punish those responsible swiftly and severely. No reasonable citizen in this country should possibly think that we should resort to torture to extract information out of people. I understand that torturning someone might save lives, but the truth of the matter is that more often than not, it won’t.

That being said… And here’s the always anticipated “but” of the argument…

I don’t trust these photos in the hands of the media or the ACLU.

Not because people will see them and react to them and be angered by them. We all have to deal with the worst among us and as a society we’re equally responsible for the actions committed in our name as we are for our own actions.

I don’t trust muslims.

Politically incorrect. Hang me. Burn me at the stake. Assault me. But frankly I don’t trust muslims.

I don’t trust them to not start killing our soldiers for the actions of a few. I don’t trust them to not start acting like rabid animals the minute these pictures hit the streets. I don’t trust them to control their bloodlust to kill the infidel. Think about what happened with the fake desecration story. 18 people dead over something that wasn’t true, or proven, or even provable (to the point where the source of the story retracted it).

Now imagine billions of muslims, whipped into a frenzy by their mullahs and their supreme leaders. Imagine all of it. Would it do anything to accomplish justice? No. Justice, in the eyes of the sons of Allah requires blood and death to the infidel. No, this would just fan the flames and turn even more muslims against the US.

Did it happen? Obviously something happened because there are photos to be released.

Something needs to be done to the soldiers who did it, and it should be severe.

Something needs to be done to the superiors of those soldiers if they’re the ones that authorized it.

Justice needs to be swift and decisive.

But putting out photos that are supposedly worse than what we’ve already seen, will do nothing in that regard. If the true intention of viewing these photos is to seek justice, then it can be done without the public seeing them, and without turning the ACLU into a propaganda arm of every two-bit arab dictator and news outlets like Al Jazeera.

This is a bad decision that will turn into a worse decision if it’s not overturned and allowed to proceed.

Source: Netscape.com