my automatic bias is that the government should not hide information from the public it is supposed to represent.

We as a society should be willing to face up to what we've done, what is done in our names, not 'protected' from knowing what others do in the guise of 'protecting' us.

Also, of course, I imagine some, maybe many, of them are evidence that would be useful in court cases against those who committed crimes.

Because you know we get confused with words and get hung up on subtle differences between illegality under the law, institutionalized immorality, and the well intentioned -mistakes- of defenders of our Rights.

Discussion of long standing international conventions and the lessons of Nuremburg are way too complicated.

Just show the bloody pictures.

DOJ REALLY wants to argue the Administration can't reveal methods, and tactics on this one?

Just show the bloody pictures.

DOJ wants to get legalish? The tortured have no privacy rights written into the constitution or HIPAA. Torturers have no protections under the precedents the US helped establish at Nuremburg.

The United States doesn't need protection from those unnamed Muslims with the determination of Eli Weisel, those Muslims who will never rest until the last war criminal is prosecuted and that person's memory is made eponymous with evils of torture.

It is a mistake to confuse the defense of high ranking masterminds of torture, such as John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, with the defense of the United States.

Just show the bloody pictures.

Or be known to history as an accomplice after the fact.

A lot of torturers take pictures and videos of the abuse they inflict. It's also common for serial murderers to take pictures and videos of their mutilated victims. I did some work with prisoners in the military and it never, ever occurred to me to take pictures. But then I was NOT torturing them. There were a couple of people I worked with that you had to keep your eye on or they would do really weird things to the prisoners. Luckily, I was senior enough to get them kicked out of the military.

You know why they take souvenir photos and videos don't you? Because they get off on it. Probably the torturer, or someone who authorized the torture, really gets a rush to see the mutilation and pain of their victims. If these torturers were not being employed by the US government, they would be out becoming serial murderers. It takes a special kind of freaky-deaky person to torture other people, even in a military environment.

Just a fun fact for people who think torturers are just mistaken patriots.

From what I've seen and what I've read, so far, I believe this has almost nothing to do with trying to extract information about future terror attacks.

Ever since the Abu Ghraib images surfaced I've been asking myself if I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. It kept nagging at me. And then Chris Hedges said it; this was Gonzo Porn.

And the more information that comes out the more I'm convinced. This is sadism. This is bondage/domination--without the safe word.

I don't claim to be an expert on torture - far from it. That said, I can think of a lot of things you could do to a person to "torture" them. But why shove a broomstick up their ass? Why puree their supper and stick it up their rectum? Why put a dog collar around their neck and drag them around by a leash? To humiliate them? What unmitigated BS!

That's the reason the videos were destroyed (or maybe they're in Darth Cheney's DVD library. I wouldn't be surprised). Because if we saw the videos it would remove all doubt about what was going on.

I believe that Cheney, Rummy, GW (remember the pedophile rumors that were swirling around Poppy Bush?) and others, were sitting in some dark room, pleasuring themselves, while watching CIA produced terror porn and snuff films. They were really getting off on it.

These are hideously twisted individuals who should be in a restricted environment for the rest of their natural lives. Instead, our President stands before the American people and talks about how we should Move On. It makes me want to puke!!

It's like a snuff porn king got a hold of the CIA and made them do nasty things.

It's not a few patriot making mistakes. It's a bunch of perverts acting out their fantasies with a willing CIA.