Sarah Lazare reports
Judge Orders US Government to Stop Suppressing Evidence of Torture and Abuse:
A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. government to release more than 2,000 photographs showing abuse and torture of people detained by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The decision is the latest development in a more than 10-year-long legal battle, in which the American Civil Liberties Unions has argued that disclosure of the records is critical for public debate and government accountability.
Many of the concealed photographs were taken by U.S. military service members and collected during more than 200 military investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some could be on par with, or worse than, those released from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
U.S. district judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled that the government "is required to disclose each and all of the photographs" in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from the ACLU. In the order, Hellerstein argued that the government did not adequately prove that "disclosure would endanger Americans."
The decision gives the Solicitor General two months to decide whether to appeal.
The ACLU has pressed for the release of records relating to torture and extrajudicial killings of prisoners in U.S. custody around the world since 2003.
The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have vigorously fought to keep these photographs suppressed, and in 2009, the White House collaborated with Congress to secretly change FOIA law to enable the concealment of the images, arguing it is necessary to protect national security.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2013—It's amazing Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol doesn't honor Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest:
There are nine individual women in the overall collection now, but only one in the Rotunda, plus the Portrait of Suffrage. That is of three leading suffragists—Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It was quickly consigned in 1921 to the less glamorous and out-of-the-way Crypt until Congress ordered it into the Rotunda in 1997 because the inscription was considered too in-your-face and "blasphemous":
"Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen, declared herself an entity to be reckoned." That inscription was whitewashed out. The District of Columbia chose to honor black abolitionist Frederick Douglass with one of its two allotted statues, but this was originally stuck in another federal office building and only ordered moved late last year to Emancipation Hall in the Capitol. Not to the more prestigious Statuary Hall in the Rotunda.
That place of honor is just too good for the likes of Douglass, or say, Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman. But Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Vice President Alexander Stephens keep their spots. There's also Zebulon Vance, North Carolina's Confederate governor during the Civil War and again in the 1870s when he was instrumental in destroying Reconstruction.
Other white supremacist statues in the collection not in the Rotunda include another North Carolinian, Charles Aycock, who helped destroy interracial politics in the Fusion Period of the late 1800s. There is Civil War Gen. Wade Hampton, who helped smash Reconstruction efforts in the postwar period in South Carolina. Slavery apologist and secession proselytizer John C. Calhoun of South Carolina has a place as well, although he at least died well before the war. And General Robert E. Lee of Virginia is there ... standing tall in his Rebel uniform.
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