'Cause we can't censor Australia,,,yet...

The government has done a good job to date of stonewalling the ACLU's attempts to get rights to the remaining Abu Gharib photos, but as it happens some of them ended up in Australia. Hey, I know new abuse photos barely make a blip on the US press radar, what with the gunshot wounds, Katrina stuff, and whatever...but trust me: the world is watching even if we aren't. I took a quick look around on Wednesday at noon. While the major US press outlets did carry the news, they weren't carrying the images (CNN had one of a hooded person holding a box, but none of the bloody ones). Curious that they are pressworthy the world over, but not in the US...

Anyway, we haven't as a nation confessed our sins on this and there will not be absolution until we do. The Australian Broadcasting Company did not publish all of the images, and they don't intend to, because some are TOO GRAPHIC. More graphic than a man beating his head against the wall. More graphic than a naked man chained upside down from a bunk bed. More graphic than the numerous wounds on a man's ass from some sort of rubber bullets. More graphic than two naked men handcuffed back to back (notice on that photo there are open wounds along one man's arm- more rubber bullets? cattle prod?). But hey...it's all water under the bridge. Just a few bad apples in the dead of night, right? There's worse, and much, if not all of it will continue to leak and haunt us: because we didn't take responsibility for it in 2003.

The funny part...is the way this leak is pretty well timed for the administration. When the Muslim world rises up in protest (as incidentally we would if they did this shit to us) the conservatives are going to spin it as a continuance of the cartoon fiasco...and we all want to defend freedom of speech. Of course that spin doesn't actually improve relations with anyone. It doesn't make our troops safer, and it doesn't accomplish anything. But it's easy to snowball Americans. After all, most read the American press, and thus haven't even seen the photos.

So this was either a clever leak all the way around the world, or somone at the NSA just got moved to monitoring calls to Australia. After all these leaks are a matter of national security. The people who want to know the truth are terrorist supporters. Those who committed the atrocities are only worthy of 10 years in jail, but the people who leaked them risk much much worse...