Obama's detainee photo options

NY Times:

The Obama administration’s strongest option as it fights to keep hundreds of photographs of prisoner abuse secret may be to classify them and claim they are exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, experts on government secrecy said Thursday.

As an alternative, the administration could go to the Supreme Court before a June 9 deadline, asking it to overturn an appeals court ruling that the photos be released. But that route would preclude playing the classification card, which some legal scholars say would be President Obama’s shrewdest tactic.

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Classifying the photos seems to be the best and most effective option. It is too bad that Bush did not use that option with the Abu Ghraid photos. The Times and others would have had a conniption, but the country would have been better off and we could have still prosecuted the Perps which we are in the process of doing to begin with.

Indeed, it was the government's refusal to stop the prosecutions that led some representing the defendants to release the Abu Ghraid photos to begin with.