America Weeps

HuffPo Update: Inside the box

UPDATE & RELATED: UN reports sez 'shut down Gitmo'Link includes link to report download. "The report will be presented to the UN Commission of Human Rights, which authorised the report, at its next session in Geneva on 13 March." (BBC)






From The Sydney Morning Herald

The photos America doesn't want seen
Shame. Shame. Not just on the men and women who did this, and the leaders who allowed it, but most of all, shame on us for looking the other way. It took an Australian paper to get this out into the sunshine.

By Matthew Moore

February 15, 2006
MORE photographs have been leaked of Iraqi citizens tortured by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Tonight the SBS Dateline program plans to broadcast about 60 previously unpublished photographs that the US Government has been fighting to keep secret in a court case with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Although a US judge last year granted the union access to the photographs following a freedom-of-information request, the US Administration has appealed against the decision on the grounds their release would fuel anti-American sentiment.

Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets.

The executive producer of Dateline, Mike Carey, said he was showing the pictures leaked to his program because it was important people understood what had happened at Abu Ghraib.

Seven US guards were jailed following publication of the first batch of Abu Ghraib photographs in April 2004.

Mr Carey said he could not explain why the photographs had not yet been published, as he thought it was likely that some journalists had them.

"It think it's strange, maybe they think its more of the same."