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US to Release Prison Pics: Reports

This one is certainly not going to be for the faint at heart, US President Barack Obama’s administration is readying to release photographs depicting the alleged abuse by US personnel at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan under ex-president George W. Bush, say media reports citing the information to a rights group.

The US Department of Defense has agreed to release for the first time 44 of the photographs by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2004.

A “substantial number of other images” are also being processed for release, the Department of Justice wrote in a letter to a US federal court, said the reports.

“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by US personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,”  ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh was quoted as saying by the French news agency AFP.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shot to infamy after pictorial content depicting Iraqi detainees and their US guards were published in 2004.

The imminent release of the pictures has touched off concerns of how the content would be received, especially as the former Bush administration had refused to release the images to the public, arguing that the disclosure would fuel outrage.

The Bush administration had cited US obligations toward detainees under the Geneva Conventions to nullify calls for the release of the pictures.

The Obama administration after an intense debate in his team released four sensitive memos last week, the documents blew the lid off harsh interrogation methods approved by the previous government.

In Vienna, the UN’s top anti-torture envoy, Manfred Nowak, on Friday said that the US is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, reported AP.

But Obama has said that CIA officers involved in interrogations should not be prosecuted as they had received legal guidance from their superiors.

The release of the memos is now in the midst of an escalating war of words with rights groups demanding prompt prosecution of former Bush administration officials and political opponents terming the release as a move that endangered national security.

(Internet inputs)

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