Why does Obama censor the rape and abuse photos?

Newspapers around the world have confirmed Sy Hersch's report that prisoners were raped at Abu Ghraib. Apparently, Obama is censoring over 2000 items of photographic evidence depicting those crimes and other abuses. (The ACLU had sought to release 44 of these images.)

Even USA Today has the story:

A former U.S. general said graphic images of rape and torture are among the photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse that President Obama's administration does not want released.

Retired Major Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the U.S. investigation into the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, was quoted as telling Britain's Daily Telegraph in an article Wednesday that he agreed with Obama's decision not to release the pictures.

I'll give you one good reason not to censor: Cover-up equals complicity. What should have been George Bush's crime now bears the signature of both Bush and Obama.

From CBS News:

He [Obama] discouraged formation of an independent commission to investigate the torture and reversed a previous position in favor of releasing Pentagon photos of abuses and instead opposed release. In his May 21 speech at the National Archives, he seemed to try to create a framework for understanding his policies, but they remained very much a work in progress. He surprisingly embraced a number of Bush policies, including military commissions for trying detainees, the use of the State Secrets privilege to protect information in court and the indefinite use of preventive detention--all to be revised in ways that were left vague or unspecified. Yet among these reversals and improvisations, one very general preference has remained steady. Throughout, Obama has expressed a desire to concentrate on the "future" rather than the "past."

This reminds me of a running gag on The Simpsons: Every time Homer says "Let's not play the blame game," you know damn well that the fault was 100 percent his. If you commit hit-and-run manslaughter, I do not suggest telling the victim's family: "Let's not dwell on the past. We should concentrate on the future!"

The view from Cheetoland is both ghastly and grimly amusing:

What Matters Isn't the Photos, It's the Torture.

Why? Because Dear Leader is always right. And Dear Leader has decided to censor the photos.

Of course, if Barack Obama were a Republican, you can bet your ass that the Kossacks would scream like a loose alternator belt until the photographic evidence was released.

Be that as it may, for those who want justice done in the case of torture - that being defined as penalizing the people who carried out torture but, more importantly, who ordered torture - the photo discussion is an unfortunate distraction.

Bullshit.

Consider: What if the world saw no film footage of the concentration camps? What if we had no images of bulldozers piling up emaciated bodies? Without those damning visuals, post-war Nazi apologists would have had a much easier time of it. The search for Josef Mengele would have lasted perhaps five years. Around 1950, Mengele would have gone home, received a wrist-slap from a German court, and opened up a practice in Munich. By the 1960s, he'd have become a frequent, avuncular presence on German television: Good old Doktor Josef.

Would anyone have paid attention to the Rodney King beating without the video? How many previous examples of police brutality in Los Angeles went unpunished because no film footage backed the eyewitness testimony?

We need the images. Visual evidence impacts the conscience in ways that words do not.

The Kossack says he wants to "justice" done. He's lying. If he wants justice, he would demand the release of the photographic evidence. That evidence will create a firestorm of outrage which will be quelled only when someone on the level of a Cheney or a Runsfeld faces trial. No visual evidence = no outrage = no trials = no justice.

Remember, Obama has discouraged any further formal inquiry into the torture. Obama wants to see justice done about as much as you want to bite off your own toes.