It's well-known that as pressure has mounted from the right, the administration has changed its mind and opposed the release of photos which reveal the abuses suffered by detainees in American military custody. Now it appears that the administration may take the next step and use an executive order to prevent the release of the photos.
Now that the odious Graham-Lieberman amendment, which sought also to prevent the release of the detainee photos, has been stripped from the war spending bill to which it was attached, several senators are calling for the administration to use an executive order to do the job, including a familiar face.
A group of senators called on President Barack Obama to issue an executive order prohibiting torture photos from being made public, just as House and Senate negotiators were set to remove language from a war funding bill that would have blocked the photos' from being released.
“The president should be publicly speaking out now,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told reporters this afternoon. “He’s been strangely quiet.”
Is the administration thinking about taking them up on their suggestion? The answer appears to be yes:
The Obama administration is looking at using an executive order to block the release of photos documenting the abuse of U.S. military detainees, said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
"I have reason to believe they are looking at that as a way to resolve this situation," Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Tuesday.
The administration is keeping very mum on this:
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, when asked at Tuesday's press briefing, said he "won't get into private conversations" the president may or may not have had with Hoyer.
"All I'm going to say on this is that the president has committed to all interested parties that he intends to do what's necessary to keep those photos from being released, and that he intends -- he intends to keep that commitment," Gibbs said.
It would have been nice to hear a firm "No--the president would never do that," but that hope was dashed.
It is true that the president does have the authority under FOIA to withhold documents for national security reasons:
This section does not apply to matters that are--
(1)(A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and (B) are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order;
But it would be a funny thing for Obama to classify these photos only after attempts to stop their release by legislative means had failed, and after a court had ruled that their release could not be prevented on the grounds that they might endanger American troops. After all, if they were such delicate government secrets, shouldn't they have been classified from the very beginning?
Let the president know that such an action would be wrong and would not serve the interests of America at all.