The new photographs from Abu Ghraib

Posted by Rachel Neumann at 11:45 AM on February 15, 2006.

I wish I could tell you a joke right now about Cheney, two beers, and a lawyer full of birdshot, because I'd relaly like to focus on something like that--good, clean fun that is rightly at the vice-president's expense. But I can't. It would be letting him, and Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and the whole administration off far too easy. Besides, I'm too naseous. I'm too furious. I'm too repelled at the human moral line that has been crossed by our representatives--in our name--at Abu Ghraib.

The summary and a link to the photographs and a video that I can't bring myself to see all the way through is here.

The images make me wonder why the bowels of the earth don't just open and swallow the President every time he makes reference to us "bringing democracy" anywhere. They make violent resistance in Iraq seem like the only justified response.

These are the photographs the U.S. government has been fighting to keep secret, believing they could provoke the kind of international and U.S. national moral outrage that would reveal how indefensiblity of both torture and our occupation of Iraq.

If you do choose to see the photographs, after taking some time to let the horror sink in, want to know what to do, contact the Center for Constitutional Rights.

They, along with the ACLU, are demanding a full investigation and the full release of the photographs in the United States. This is one of those momens where no one can say they didn't know what our government was doing. This is one of those historical moments where passivity is tantamount to complicity.

Rachel Neumann is Rights & Liberties Editor at AlterNet.