Another Idea goes mobile.

You’ll see all the latest posts, cartoons and polls, automatically formatted to fit your screen.  Take a spin, and let us know what you think.

Your suggestion in “The ACLU’s Photo Shoot” (Review & Outlook, April 27) that the government should suppress photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces is disturbing, particularly because it comes from a news organization.

You argue that the photos should be withheld because they will generate outrage against Americans, but that argument would afford the greatest protection from disclosure to records that depict the worst kinds of abuse. Notably, the Bush administration advanced this argument in litigation but both the district court and a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected it. When the government petitioned the entire appeals court to reconsider, the petition was dismissed summarily.

For years, the Bush administration claimed that the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody was aberrational and that it occurred in spite of policy, rather than because of it. Many news organizations adopted this official narrative as their own. It is time now for the public to have firsthand access to the evidence. The public should be permitted to determine for itself whether the Bush administration’s official narrative had any basis whatsoever in the truth.

Jameel Jaffer
Amrit Singh
New York

The writers are attorneys for the ACLU.