At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube...
The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.
Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.
“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.
“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”
One thing that I have learned in the course of doing my death penalty research is that in American culture, "if there aren't pictures, the violence isn't real." This is why crime scene photographs are fetishized while executions are untelevised, why Bush wanted to keep images of soldiers' coffins returning home off the airwaves, and why Americans often seem more emotionally affected by violent scenes in movies or on TV than they are by what's happening in Rwanda or Darfur. (It's not that no pictures are available, of course, but it requires special effort to find them...effort most will not go to.)
That's why I'm greatly disturbed by Obama's choice to give the public absolutely no access to photographs of Iraqi prisoners being sexually abused by American soldiers. There is obviously some concern that those in the pictures not be further victimized by having these photographs used casually or without respect for the great emotional and physical pain which is captured in each one. Any decision by individuals to publish them would have to be given a lot of careful thought and consideration. Yet to give the public no access at all to the photographs ensures that for many Americans the violence done here in their names will never seem quite "real" to them. And Obama and General Taguba do not justify the decision with any reference to those being abused--instead they say that releasing them would "put our troops in greater danger." This is not a question of respect for the victims but fear of reprisals.
Abu Ghraib is already a story associated with photographs, and we have already seen horrific scenes from the prison splashed across magazine covers and television screens. Why release further photos? Because sexual abuse does cross a further line in both our culture and most world cultures--thanks to our understanding of sexuality as being an essential part of the self, it goes beyond mere abuse of the body or mind and attacks a person's core sense of being. Recognizing the full horror of what occurred in Abu Ghraib is painful but necessary for Americans to understand how fully they, a supposedly Christian nation, have denied the humanity of Iraqis, whom they believed to have been created in God's own image. We cannot hope to atone for our sins until we have seen them in their full horror, and accepted our own culpability.
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