Obama Comes to His Senses, Won't Release Abuse Photos

This is what pandering to the far left gets you. An enormous headache and the appearance of being a vacillating jellyfish.

On the upside, you're doing the right thing.

As Democrats appear to be feeling the limits of national security politics, President Obama has reversed course and will object to the court-ordered release of photos depicting the abuse of detainees.

More here.

ACLU SLAMS: “If it’s true that they’re reversing position, we find that wholly unacceptable,” ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer told POLITICO. “It’s inconsistent with the commitment they’ve made to the court and its inconsistent with the promise of transparency that they’ve repeated many times both before the election and since.”

Jaffer said the ACLU had not been officially informed of the government’s change in stance, which he earlier called an effort to “renege” on the administration’s prior promise.

From Jake Tapper:

The move is a complete 180. In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge on April 23, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.

The photographs are part of a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU for all information relating to the treatment of detainees -- the same battle that led to President Obama's decision to release memos from the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel providing legal justifications for brutal interrogation methods, many of which the International Committee of the Red Cross calls torture.

It's unclear what step the White House will now take, whether the administration will challenge the release in appellate court with new arguments or whether it will take the case to the Supreme Court.

But the idea that the photos should not be released because they would be a national security risk for US troops is hardly a new argument.

The Bush administration had argued that an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act was needed with these photographs because of the FOIA exemption for law enforcement records that could reasonably be expected to endanger “any individual." The release of the disputed photographs, the Bush administration argued, will endanger United States troops, other Coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Update: Excitable Andy:

Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predcessors' war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to proscute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention.

Take a deep breath.

Waterboarding as Fetish: Freakazoids Turned on by Club Gitmo and Abu Ghraib

No shortage of weirdos out there.

It's eerie dark in the exhibition hall at the New Jersey Convention Center in Edison.

Usually, the room is reserved for trade shows. But this summer weekend, it's been transformed into a 40,000-square-foot dungeon for sexual fantasy.

Welcome to The Floating World, three days of suspended reality geared toward those who explore extremes in carnality. The program encompassed bondage, sadomasochism and role playing -- including Gitmo-inspired interrogator/detainee "torture" sessions.

The private event -- no tickets sold at the door, no advertising anywhere but the Web -- drew nearly 1,000 attendees of every sexual orientation, from Jersey and beyond. The registration fee for the gathering, which ran Friday through yesterday, was $125-$190.

The course catalog featured a mix of lectures about relationships and hands-on safety workshops. There were lessons in whipping, caning, roping, gagging, punching, burning, biting, spanking and "power flogging."

"Education is really important," says Dan Andersen, director of the Floating World, a nonprofit event launched last year and named for an Edo-era Japanese subculture. "If you take your education from the movies, you're going to do a lot of bad things."

A sign of the times, the course list also included "Interrogation and Torture Techniques." The class, which outlined how to fetishize Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, was taught by an instructor with a military background. The core idea of torture play is to integrate topical imagery as a trigger to boost fear and stimulate endorphins.

"When we're using those references, it's to provoke a reaction," says Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and an author whose latest novel is titled "A Pound of Flesh."

"Anybody who protests us should ask themselves why they are not protesting the reality of torturing prisoners. We're consenting adults. We might get in a pool with each other and waterboard somebody, but the person can say, 'No, I don't like this.' They have a safeword." (Prearranged "safewords" are established as a stop signal.)

Some arrived at the convention center in plain vanilla street clothes, while others strutted their liberated stuff in body stockings, dog collars and shoes that could double as daggers. Scattered amid the cars in the parking lot were carts for "ponies," people saddled and harnessed like horses.

Shocking 'New' Abu Ghraib Photos So Unspeakable, Rise Nearly to Frat Initiation Levels

They're being plugged as disturbing. Maybe I'll be disturbed by the fact the New York Times now has seven months of fresh material leading up to the election.

I figure they can't keep making up stores about John McCain, so this will give them cause to just keep bashing Bush.

Anyway, here's the breathless account from Wired.

Viewer discretion advised, of course. Sadly, there are no photos of prisoners jumping over sharks.

This next one is so unspeakably cruel, one can hardly hold back the tears.


The horrors!

Crackpot Director: Abu Ghraib 'Perhaps the Major News Event of our Time'

I guess this may well be true in the far-left fever swamps or for those whose sole source of information is the New York Times.

Seriously, though, this guy really needs to step back and look at the atrocities that occur in this world on a daily basis. Nonstop acts of murder by Muslim fanatics going on for several decades now, the killing fields in southeast Asia, genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere in Africa, the list can go on.

But some moron with an axe to grind thinks an isolated incident in a hellhole prison in Iraq is the major news event of our time.

Good grief, take a pill and STFU already.

He'd also like to "see a lot of people in the administration indicted," yet cannot offer a coherent thought why or even who it is that should be indicted.

Anyway, this loser has his silly film debuting at the Berlin International Film Festival and will probably say anything for attention.

I have no doubt this dreck will quickly go the way of Redacted and the rest of the garbage the anti-war left continues to churn out.

An amusing question is raised about possible censorship of the film, as if the administration would waste a second of their time trying to censor films nobody is going to see.

What probably irks Errol Morris and the rest of his ilk more than anything is they're irrelevant and George W. Bush doesn't care what they think, nor should he.

He has far more important things to worry about than some narcissistic twit like Morris.

Update: Reader Tom had some interesting comments about Morris, so to be fair, here's a Wikipedia bio page on Morris and his background. His association with the discredited MoveOn.org (as well as a donation to them)is enough to raise my suspicions of him. I'm not questioning his artistic ability, as I'm not a film-maker, but I simply find the Abu Ghraib subject rather tiresome and blown way out of all proportion.

Update II: Hot Air links. Thanks!

The Moment We've Been Waiting For: Abu Ghraib Documentary to Premiere

You get the feeling the left will still be carping about the alleged horrors of Abu Ghraib 150 years from now.

You don't see any celebrity documentaries about the mass killings of Saddam Hussein. You hear diddly squat about the hundreds of annual public executions in Iran.

The murder and imprisonment of political prisoners in Cuba?

Pfft.

But a few soldiers get out of hand, pose with prisoners and put panties on their heads? Why it's nonstop coverage for five years, now culminating in a documentary, which is sure to sweep up awards and accolades worldwide, just because it makes us looks bad.

Abu Ghraib documentary in Berlin premiere

A FILM about the prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail will become the first documentary ever to enter the competition at the Berlin Film Festival next month, organisers said overnight.

Standard Operating Procedure by Oscar-winning director Errol Morris uses recovered footage, reenactments and the notorious photographs published round the world to shed light on the sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi inmates by US troops at the notorious prison outside Baghdad.

"It kept us glued to our seats," Berlinale chief Dieter Kosslick said of the film ahead of the February 7 to 17 event.

"The known facts are presented in a way like you have never seen them before. That is the best thing a documentary can do."

Morris, who will turn 60 next month, won an Academy Award for his incisive 2003 documentary The Fog of War about former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara.

His films The Thin Blue Line about the death penalty in the United States and A Brief History of Time on the disabled British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking were also international successes.

Mr Kosslick said the line-up of the 58th Berlinale would be less political than in recent years and focus on music in cinema.

Yes, it will be less political by presenting this documentary and bashing George W. Bush over the head once again.

Abu Ghraib as Art

These leftwing bedwetters will just never get over the "horrors" of Abu Ghraib, and now a washed up 60's relic, Gerald Laing, has resurfaced to glom on and get some attention.

Have another hit, dude.

'Look Mickey, I've Hooked a Big One'

After a 30-year break, the contemporary of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein has put brush back to canvas in protest of the Iraq war. The artist, born in northern England in 1936, stopped creating Pop Art paintings in the 1960s but returned to the form this year for the show, painting pictures that show the humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as well as the bombing of Baghdad. "These show the decay of the American dream," he told the wire service Reuters. "We are losing freedoms very fast. Things like freedom of speech that we took for granted in the 1960s have already gone."

"These pictures make a point," he added. "They will always be there for people to see. Blair may be gone from office -- with Bush soon to follow -- but these images will endure," he added. "They are a constant reminder of these shameful events."

If freedom of speech is gone, how is it he gets to make these portraits, put them on display, and get free publicity in a newspaper?

No word on whether this twit plans portraits of Sdaam Hussein's mass graves.