Who Is Obama Keeping Those Photographs From and Why?
by James Glaser
May 29, 2009

President Obama is telling us that he is stopping the publishing of the photographs of the criminal abuse by American troops of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib to help keep our soldiers safe. I don't buy that.

First off, the rest of the world has already seen the first batch of those photos a few years ago. Secondly, newspapers all over the world have written stories about these new pictures. In the May 28th edition of The Telegraph/UK the headline reads,

Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse.

The article was written by The Telegraph's Security Correspondents, Duncan Gardham and Paul Cruickshank. Here are a few quotes from the column.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire, and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

The story says that they got "the content from Major General Antanio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq." General Taguba said he got sworn statements from 13 detainees and that he found those statements to be "credible based on the clarity of the statements and the supporting evidence provided by other witnesses."

One statement was about how a young Iraqi "kid" was raped by an American soldier while female American soldiers took pictures. Other told about rapes using part of a policeman's "stick" and that these acts were photographed, too.

Well, we now know what those photographs are all about, and so does the rest of the world. Maybe the actual photos would make America's image worse, but it would be hard to make our image any worse than it is now. You have to know that every foreign press in the world has picked up this story, and somehow those photos are going to get out. You know they are worth a lot of money to the first person to make a deal.

The whole world knows what American troops do and have done to prisoners held by them. Abu Ghraib is nothing new, it is just the first time there has been photographic proof along with prisoner's statements.

President Obama is not trying to protect our troops from the eyes of the world. The world knows and has known what our troops are capable of. No, President Obama is trying to keep those photos from the American people.

When the American people finally see for themselves what our troops do in their name, the military industrial complex will have a harder time getting the American public to back their wars. That means a loss of money, and money is the very reason America constantly fights wars.

Obama will do everything he can to keep those photographs in the dark, but they will come out sooner or later. They won't hurt our troops any more than our troops were hurt by the first batch that the media published, but they will hurt the people who are telling our new President what to do, and they will hurt the bottom line of the American corporations who are the world's merchants of death.

That "bottom line" is the real reason President Obama wants to stop us from seeing those photos.

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