Pentagon Agrees To Release Alleged Prisoner Abuse Photos

April 24, 2009 8:25 a.m. EST

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - The Pentagon on Thursday agreed to release photos showing the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, images that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says prove that detainee abuse was widespread during the Bush administration.

In a letter to the U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin said the Defense Department will release photos in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU in 2004. Officials are processing 44 photos plus "a substantial number of other images," and will release them on May 28.

The ACLU had made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release the photos, and filed the lawsuit when it was denied by the Bush administration. A 2006 court ruling ordered 21 photos of prisoner treatment in Afghanistan and Iraq released, and the U.S. Court of Appeals last September upheld that ruling.

The Pentagon will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, Dassin said in the letter.

"The disclosure of these photographs serves as a further reminder that abuse of prisoners in U.S.-administered detention centers was systemic," Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, said in a statement. "Some of the abuse occurred because senior civilian and military officials created a culture of impunity in which abuse was tolerated, and some of the abuse was expressly authorized."

"These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib," Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. added.

The Justice Department's decision comes the same week as the release of congressional reports concluding that senior Bush administration officials authorized harsh interrogation tactics.

Last week, the Obama administration also declassified four Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos that allowed terror suspects to be interrogated by Bush administration using methods such as waterboarding or simulated drowning, which critics say is torture.

The Senate Armed Services on Tuesday released a report that said senior Bush administration officials had solicited information about aggressive interrogation methods and authorized these.

"In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel's Office had already solicited information on detainee 'exploitation' from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions," the report said.

On Wednesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that said former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had approved waterboarding as early as 2002 when she authorized the interrogation method as the National Security Adviser to Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaeda member captured the same year and detained in Guantanamo Bay.

Vice President Dick Cheney has repeatedly defended the use of waterboarding and said the United States would have been attacked again if the Bush administration had not pursued its anti-terror policies. This week he told FOX that the Obama administration should not just release memos about waterboarding, but also those that "showed the success of the effort."