WASHINGTON: The US Department of Defence has released nearly 200 photographs linked to allegations of prisoner-abuse by American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq over a decade ago.

The Pentagon released the photos “after more than a decade of legal battles and stonewalling”, said the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which filed a freedom of information request for the pictures in 2004.

All 198 images are close-ups of bruises and cuts on prisoners’ arms and legs.

The abuse scandal came to light in 2004 when the US media published shocking pictures of American soldiers sexually abusing and torturing detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib.

But the Pentagon said the pictures, sent to ACLU on Friday were not of detainees held in Abu Ghraib or at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

These were from more than 50 “independent criminal investigations into allegations of misconduct by US personnel”, a Pentagon spokesman told reporters.

He said that 14 of these allegations were substantiated and 65 US service personnel were ‘disciplined’ for committing human rights violation. Some of these “service personnel were also reprimanded to life imprisonment”, the spokesman added.

The photos include wider shots of prisoners, most of them bound or blindfolded. “But what they don’t show is a much bigger story,” said an ACLU statement issued by its office in Washington. “The government’s selective release of these photos could mislead the public about the true scope of what happened.”

The ACLU had asked for some 2,000 pictures of detainees in US custody, but received only 198. The released photos “are almost certainly the most innocuous of the 2,000 that were being withheld”, it said.

“From what we can infer from the descriptions, we know that the most damning evidence of government abuse remains hidden from the public,” the ACLU said.

The statement said that the photos still being withheld include those related to the case of a 73-year-old Iraqi woman detained and allegedly sexually abused and assaulted by US soldiers.

Other pictures depict an Iraqi teenager bound and standing in the headlights of a truck immediately after his mock execution staged by US soldiers. Another shows the body of Muhamad Husain Kadir, an Iraqi farmer, shot dead at point-blank range by an American soldier while handcuffed.

“To justify its withholdings, the government cites a general fear that exposing the misconduct of government personnel may incite others to violence against Americans and US interests,” the ACLU said.

But the group warned that this argument “gives terrorists the power” to determine what Americans can know about their own government.

“No democracy has ever been strengthened by suppressing evidence of its own crimes,” the ACLU said.

“Suppressing the most powerful evidence of our government’s abuses makes confronting those abuses impossible.”

The issue was also raised at the US State Department news briefing where a journalist asked spokesman John Kirby if he agreed with the suggestion that releasing these photos could lead to retaliatory attacks.

“I wouldn’t speculate one way or the other. I certainly wouldn’t want to say anything that could in any way have an effect on that,” he said.

Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2016

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