The American Legion is trying to stop the May 28 release of photographs showing American personnel abusing detainees in Afghan and Iraqi prisons.
The Department of Defense agreed last month to release some of the requested photographs in response to an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act request.
U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., among others, is helping the American Legion in its fight to stop release of the photos.
Blackburn, whose district includes suburbs of Nashville and Memphis, decided to help the Legion after reading an article by its commander, David K. Rebhein, last week asking the Defense Department to appeal the issue to the Supreme Court. "A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth the death of a single American soldier?" Rebhein asked in The Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
Blackburn has organized a forum for other lawmakers on Capitol Hill Wednesday afternoon to plot strategies for stopping the release. She believes they are "illustrative and inflammatory, but they don't serve any useful public-knowledge purpose," her spokesman, Claude Chafin, said Tuesday.
Other opponents of the release, including Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., maintain the pictures will harm troop morale while acting as a propaganda tool for terrorists and anti-American extremists.
In 2003, the ACLU sought the photographs from detention facilities other than Abu Ghraib, the infamous Baghdad facility where detainees were photographed naked and in dog collars, sparking riots in some Muslim cities and charges against some soldiers. When its initial efforts were refused, the ACLU sued in federal court in 2004.
The ACLU maintains the public needs to see "visual proof that prisoner abuse was not aberrational but widespread," its lawyer, Amrit Singh, has said.
"Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse," Singh said.
A spokesman for the American Legion, Craig R. Roberts, said the country's oldest and largest veterans service organization, with 2.6 million members, is hoping to influence the Obama administration to block the release or appeal a ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York to the Supreme Court.
A three-judge panel of appellate judges ruled last September against Bush administration efforts to use FOIA exemptions as what it called "an all-purpose damper on global controversy," and ordered the pictures released.
"We don't really see any point to their release," said Roberts. "They would do more harm than good in the sense that they demoralize troops, possibly putting them in danger, and be used as a propaganda tool for terrorist organizations as they have been in the past."
(E-mail Bartholomew Sullivan of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., at SullivanB(at)SHNS.com.)
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