Clear Picture

by digby

Alex Koppelman at Salon has General Taguba on the record saying that the pictures that are being withheld by the government are not those to which he was referring. Koppleman also clarifies some of the confusion by showing that some of the pictures under discussion are among those that have already been released. So, that seems to clear up the question of whether or not the pictures are worse than what we’ve seen before — and whether or not the administration is covering up some crimes which have gone uninvestigated. The pictures are not the lurid images the Telegraph said they were.

Of course, this raises the most important question again (for me at least) which is why anyone thinks the withheld pictures will cause some sort of firestorm if they are actually less incendiary than what we’ve seen before. The logic of that just escapes me. If the new pictures showed people being raped with objects, then I can see why the military wouldn’t want them out there. If they are just pictures of something similar to what Graner and the crew did, or something more mundane, then it’s ludicrous that they will cause any trouble overseas at this point. I’m not sure anyone would even know the difference between these new ones and the ones already there if that’s the case.

Whatever. The whole thing has always stunk to high heaven because the only people who are doing time for any of this are some lowly grunts when it’s obvious to anyone with eyes and ears that much of this stuff was a result of Cheney ordering the gloves to be taken off and General Geoffrey Miller being called in to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. Not that any of them will ever pay the price for that.

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