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WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama will try to block the court-ordered release of hundreds of photos showing U.S. troops allegedly abusing prisoners, reversing his position after military commanders warned the graphic images could stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger soldiers. ... The White House announced Obama's decision Wednesday, after top military commanders in the two wars expressed fears that showing the pictures could put their troops at higher risk. ...

Obama Opposes Releasing Photos of U.S. Detainee Abuse President Obama has decided not to release the photos which the Pentagon had planned to release by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. A senior administration official told FOX News that President Obama told his legal advisers last week that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the photos because he believes they would endanger U.S. troops, and that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented in federal court. "Obama would be...

If President Obama wanted to refrain from releasing these photos in order to protect the military forces he commands or promote the security of Americans — his two highest obligations as president — he could do so by simply issuing an executive order. The applicable statute expressly allows for it, just as it provides for Congress — now in the firm control of the president and his party — to withhold the photos from disclosure. Instead, Obama and congressional Democrats are choosing to release the photos. They are making that choice fully aware that it will cost lives. It is...

News reports described the meeting as a touching and powerful coming together of the president and these long-suffering families. Mr. Obama had won over even those who opposed his decision to close Gitmo by assuaging their fears that the review of some 245 current detainees would result in dangerous jihadists being set free. “I did not vote for the man, but the way he talks to you, you can’t help but believe in him,” said John Clodfelter to the New York Times. His son, Kenneth, was killed in the Cole bombing. “[Mr. Obama] left me with a very positive feeling...

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White House says Holder will decide on prosecutions; Obama opposes special commission on Bush-era policies. BY WILL DUNHAM WASHINGTON, April 26 (Reuters) - Releasing classified memos showing whether harsh Bush-era interrogation methods yielded useful information from terrorism suspects is not necessary, Republican Senator John McCain said on Sunday in a public disagreement with former Vice President Dick Cheney. After President Barack Obama released four memos this month revealing the Bush administration's legal justification for methods such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning -- Cheney called for declassifying any memos showing that these techniques succeeded in producing valuable information....

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Democratic senator said Sunday independent investigators should determine whether Bush administration officials ought to face charges over the harsh interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists. The White House had hoped to put the matter behind it by letting the attorney general make that call. Other liberal Democratic lawmakers appearing on the Sunday news shows joined Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in pressuring the Obama administration to pursue investigations into the interrogations policies. But they stopped short of demanding charges against the Bush-era lawyers and other officials who devised the policies that critics have denounced as torture....

America is bracing itself for another Abu Ghraib-style scandal as Washington agreed to release fresh pictures depicting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Defense Department will release a 'substantial number' of photos before May 28, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The move is in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the group in 2004 and will include images from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan at locations other than Abu Ghraib, the group said. 'These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far...

FYI: The org "World Can't Wait" is an "anti-war" front for the Revolutionary Communist Party. The RCP, on their website, calls for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Former Abu Ghraib Brigadier General, Janis Karpinski, is listed as an "endorser" of the WCW movement on the World Can't Wait website. House Judiciary Committee chairman/Bush administration "torture investigators", democrat John Conyers Jr of Michigan, and HJC member, Maxine Waters, have also each given their endorsements to the Revolutionary Communist Party movement/organization, "World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime" (they'll probably be dropping the "Drive Out the Bush Regime" portion of...

WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. "After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to...

Sen. John McCain warned that a pursuit for charges against Bush administration officials who helped design harsh interrogation tactics used on terrorist suspects would turn into a "witch hunt." Speaking on CBS' The Early Show, the former Vietnam POW and Republican opponent of President Barack Obama in the 2008 election, said there is no evidence that he knows of that shows the officials who approved the tactics weren't giving plausible legal advice. This will have a "chilling effect on legal counsel," McCain said. McCain, who was himself tortured as a U.S. soldier by his North Vietnamese captors, was a vocal...

Janis Karpinski, the former commander of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison who was demoted in the wake of the revelations of abuse there, tells Al Jazeera about her reaction to a report that says senior Bush administration officials were involved in approving torture. Report also says Cheney and Rumsfeld were behing the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib. Scott Horton, a human rights lawyer and writer on national security issues based in New York, tells Al Jazeera's Shihab Rattansi a new senate report links the White House to the abusive techniques used in US prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an attempt to win sanctions against a former top Bush administration official over brutal interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a lawyers group deployed a strategy Monday that worked against Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Former Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes II is the first of several former policy makers the National Lawyers Guild wants reprimanded, suspended or disbarred for their roles in detainee abuse, said Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area guild chapter that filed a complaint against Haynes with the California Bar Assn. Haynes, now an attorney with Chevron Corp....

Two weeks ago, I was among a small group of USS Cole and 9/11 victims’ families who met with President Obama at the White House. Despite President Obama’s assurances that the safety and security of the American people is his number one priority, I left the meeting with little confidence that the President appreciates the grave consequences of shutting down Guantanamo or the complex problems associated with adjudicating detainee cases in the federal court system. Indeed, he told us that he is “not at all concerned” about the security issues of bringing the detainees to the U.S. His rationale for...

Abu Ghraib prison is reopening under Iraqi control(video). Abu Ghraib prison is reopening under Iraqi control. The prison was closed in 2006. It was handed over to the Iraqis and never used in any significant way until now. Abu Ghraib will now be called the "Baghdad Central Prison". We can all sleep well knowing the Iraqis treat their prisoners in a more humane manner than the Americans did. If you believe that, you have stopped drinking the Cool-aid and started eating the powder straight from the package.

Academic Creeds by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 18, 2009 It’s one thing when jaundiced observers such as your servant dissect higher education. It’s quite another when the dissection is done by insiders, particularly when they haven’t left their day jobs yet. “Here is the question: Are we really free today, or are we now becoming more and more enslaved by the constructs of the Übermensch-the superman-the power brokers, the elites, the ‘fittest’ who have survived in the political arenas of campaigns or campuses?” Oklahoma Wesleyan University president Everett Piper asks in the January 2009 issue of Perspective magazine. “Are we...

BAGHDAD – Iraq will reopen the notorious Abu Ghraib prison next month, but it's getting a facelift and a new name, a senior justice official said Saturday. The heavily fortified compound of gray, stonewalled buildings and watchtowers has come to symbolize American abuse of some prisoners captured in Iraq after photos were released showing U.S. soldiers sexually humiliating inmates at the facility. The scandal stoked support for the insurgency and was one of the biggest setbacks to the U.S. military effort to win the peace in Iraq. The renovated facility will be called Baghdad's Central Prison because the name Abu...

A resident of Abu Ghraib shops in the market, Jan. 3. The Abu Ghraib market, west of Baghdad, is in the process of a facelift. Plans are in place to expand the current market and refurbish existing structures. Photo by Benjamin Roark, 25th Infantry Division. ABU GHRAIB — As the sun crests the horizon and local merchants open their doors for another business day, a line of dump trucks forms in the city market here. This caravan sits waiting to receive their cargo of mangled steel, rubble and concrete lying nearby. The foreman issues sharp, quick commands to the drivers....

Sen. John McCain (?-Ariz.), joining with liberal Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), issued a report last week on the abuse of terrorist detainees. The report accuses former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes, and David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, of causing the torture of terrorist detainees. But the report is a clumsy calumny, contradicting the factual conclusions of earlier, far more credible investigations. Predictably, it was enough for the New York Times to call for the appointment of a prosecutor to consider criminal charges against Rumsfeld and the others....

A Senate committee report makes clear that top officials were responsible for abuse and torture A naked Iraqi detainee is attacked by dogs held by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. It wasn't just a few bad apples. It never was. Of course, the Pentagon and the Justice Department wanted us to believe that the abuses that Americans carried out at Abu Ghraib were strictly the excesses of a small group of poorly trained and inadequately supervised reservists. But consider cases such as that of Imad Khudair, swept up in a raid and held for nine months in 2003, before being...