Editor 's note : Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh are attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and co-authors of `` Administration of Torture : A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond '' . Jaffer is counsel to the plaintiffs in ACLU v. Department of Defense , a lawsuit that has forced the release of more than 100,000 pages of government documents concerning the abuse of prisoners . Singh is lead counsel in the suit seeking disclosure of photographs of U.S. personnel abusing prisoners at overseas locations . Jameel Jaffer says the courts have ruled that refusal to disclose the abuse photos was unlawful . ( CNN ) -- Last week President Obama announced that he would suppress prisoner abuse photographs that he earlier said he would release . Given the president 's stated commitment to government transparency , this reversal was both surprising and profoundly disappointing . The ACLU has sought release of these photos for almost six years . In October 2003 , we filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records -- including photographs -- relating to the abuse of prisoners in U.S. detention facilities overseas . In 2005 , a federal judge in New York ruled that the Bush administration 's refusal to disclose the photographs was unlawful , and in 2008 a federal appeals court unanimously affirmed that decision . The Bush administration continued to suppress the photos , and now President Obama has vowed to do the same . The photos are a critical part of the historical record . The government has acknowledged that they depict prisoner abuse at locations other than Abu Ghraib , and it 's clear that the photos would provide irrefutable evidence that abuse was widespread and systemic . The photos would also shed light on the connection between the abuse and the decisions of high-level Bush administration officials . As the district court recognized , the photos are `` the best evidence of what happened . '' In explaining his change of heart , President Obama said that the release of the photos `` would not add any additional benefit '' to the ongoing public debate about the abuse of prisoners . But the ongoing public debate is rife with false claims , and the photos would expose the truth . The Bush administration told the public that abuse was aberrational and isolated , and many media organizations adopted this fraudulent narrative as their own . But even President Obama , in explaining his reversal , perpetuated the myth that the abuse of prisoners `` was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals . '' President Obama 's statement was meant to explain why the photos would not inform the public debate , but it only underscored why the release of the photographs is so important . Many Americans still believe that abuse took place in spite of policy rather than because of it . The truth is that senior officials authorized the use of barbaric interrogation methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes , and even abuse that was not expressly authorized was traceable to a climate in which abuse was tolerated and often encouraged . The photos would help tell this story . President Obama 's other rationale for suppressing the photographs is that they would `` inflame anti-American opinion and put our troops in greater danger , '' an argument that was repeatedly rejected by the courts when made by the Bush administration . Nobody , of course , wants to see anyone get hurt by the release of this or any other information . But the fundamental problem with the government 's argument is that it lacks a limiting principle . Any photograph of prisoner abuse , civilian casualties in Afghanistan , or U.S. military operations in Iraq could be used to `` inflame anti-American opinion '' ; indeed , the same is true of any news article that discusses ( for example ) torture , Guantanamo , or the CIA 's secret prisons . iReport.com : Did Obama make the right decision on photos ? To give the government the power to suppress information because it might anger an unidentified set of people in an unspecified part of the world and ultimately endanger an ill-defined group of U.S. personnel would be to invest it with a virtually unlimited censorial power . And by investing it with such power , we would effectively be affording the greatest protection from disclosure to records that depict the worst kinds of government misconduct . President Obama has inherited a legacy of lawlessness and abuse , and it 's not easy to untangle that . But the idea that suppressing the photographs will help the country turn the page on the last eight years is misguided . We can not make a clean break with the past until the public knows what happened in the detention centers and why . Blinding ourselves to the ugly consequences of the Bush administration 's policies only deprives us of the opportunity to learn from recent history . And if we fail to learn from this history , we are bound to repeat it . The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh .
ACLU lawyers : We filed Freedom of Information request for abuse records . The response was that the FBI had destroyed all copies, and we were not allowed to see them again until after a court order ( which they refused ) Comment: I'm going to assume you're Lawyers : Release of photos would show extent of prisoner abuse . They say government should n't stop release because of possible negative reaction .