Damage Done

The American Civil Liberties Union is quite right to cry foul at President Obama’s refusal to release more than 2,000 photos documenting detainee mistreatment at U.S. military prison facilities in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”

The ACLU and other civil rights activists have mainly voiced concern over the domestic legal and political implications of withholding the photos. But the Obama White House appears to be at least as equally worried about international reaction in making its decision. Top Pentagon officials have apparently convinced the president that airing such photos may inflame anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and make U.S. troops less safe than they already are in combat zones. The administration’s thinking on reaction in the Muslim world is as wrongheaded as its domestic calculation, however.

True, the Pentagon leadership is correct in anticipating that such photos will enrage many Muslims who see them. But the Muslims who would do harm to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already enraged, and there is no use in making any effort at placating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan or the Shi’ite militias and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Members of these various camps have brought us lately things like school poisonings in Afghanistan and bombing carnage in Iraq so severe that the hitherto slow return of refugees has all but stopped.

What will the rest of the Islamic world outside radical circles think? We can guess. By all accounts the photos contain images that would offend anyone who values human rights, regardless of faith. To suggest that the Islamic world in general is so reactionary that it cannot handle a frank disclosure of misdeeds by the United States on human rights is an insult to Muslims and a contradiction of Obama’s pledge for a new approach by the United States towards followers of Islam around the world.

For one, probably nothing in those photos will shock anyone familiar with detainee treatment in, say, Egypt, Algeria, Syria or Iran. Most of the abusive practices done by the United States are already widely known in those countries and elsewhere in the Islamic world. And U.S. human rights abuses pale in comparison in many regards to the past and present abuses of some predominantly Islamic nations.

In other words, they can handle it. And the Obama administration must open up further on this issue now and in the future if it is indeed serious about having a better relationship with the Islamic world. Withholding the photos will only increase suspicion and resentment towards the United States from the Muslim world, deepening a gulf already too wide.