Same As The Old Boss?

From Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, Unexceptional Americans by Tom Engelhardt:

Murder, torture, abuse… and photos of the same. We've seen some of them, of course. Now, evidently under pressure from his top generals, President Obama has decided to fight the release of other grim photos from the dark side of the Bush years of offshore injustice -- on the grounds that their publication might inflame opinion in the Middle East and our various war zones (as if fighting to suppress their publication won't). In this way, just as the president is in the process of making Bush's wars his own, so he seems to be making much of the nightmare legacy of those years of crime, torture, and cover-up his, too.

Read the rest here.

The Photographs

From Obama is Wrong on Torture Photos:

Perhaps, what Obama’s predecessor managed to visit on America and the rest of the world in the name of fighting terror over the past eight years can never be obliterated. But this president, with his historic mandate and extraordinary global support, is at least trying. And there are signs that the world is beginning to revise its opinion about America. That is why President Obama’s decision to block the release of photographs of torture and prisoner abuse by the US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan is unfortunate.

The Pentagon had agreed to release the damning photographs, after the American Civil Liberties Union approached a court to make them public. Now the president has used his extraordinary powers to veto the court ruling.

The right-wing argument is that releasing these photos would be harmful to the troops. Don’t the people who would want to “harm” the troops the most already know what the photos depict? After all, they are the ones living what the photos show. Or they have relatives and friends who have told them what the pictures show. It is the American people who are being kept in the dark here. Why do you suppose that is? What is it that they don’t want us to know? Could the reality depicted in the photos be worse than what we can imagine?