White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has just sent a note to the press corps (headlined “Important — Please Read”) addressing the controversy over whether those still-secret detention photos show rape and other acts of extreme abuse. “A number of you have asked about or reported on a recent article in the Telegraph that inaccurately described photos which are the subject of an ongoing lawsuit,” Gibbs began:
Both the Department of Defense and the White House have said the article was wrong, and now the individual who was purported to be the source of the article has said it’s inaccurate. Given that this false report has been repeated around the world, and given the impact these negative reports have on our troops, I felt it was important for you to see this correction.
Gibbs directed reporters to this story in the online magazine Salon:
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba denied reports that he has seen the prisoner-abuse photos that President Obama is fighting to keep secret, in an exclusive interview with Salon Friday night.
On Thursday an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that Taguba, the lead investigator into Abu Ghraib abuse, had seen images Obama wanted suppressed, and supported the president’s decision to fight their release.
The paper quoted Taguba as saying, “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”
But Taguba says he wasn’t talking about the 44 photographs that are the subject of an ongoing ACLU lawsuit that Obama is fighting.
“The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen,” Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress…
Many of those photos, Salon says, have already been published — in, among other places, Salon. But the article goes on to say that the Telegraph story was accurate in one respect: that Taguba does, in fact, support Obama’s decision to keep the other pictures secret.
