Australian public broadcaster SBS on Thursday defended its decision to show previously unseen pictures of the abuse of prisoners in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison by United States troops.
The producer of the Dateline programme that aired the photographs and videos, Mike Carey, dismissed complaints from Washington that the broadcast could further inflame anti-US sentiment and endanger troops in Iraq.
Describing the charge as a “joke”, Carey told the national AAP news agency that troops are already at great risk in Iraq.
“I don’t think anything that we do here in Australia is going to make their risk any greater or smaller,” he was quoted as saying. “We put them to air because it’s our responsibility as reporters to get this stuff on air.”
The Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard is a close ally of US President George Bush and has about 900 troops in Iraq.
A Pentagon spokesperson said on Wednesday the pictures could “further inflame and possibly incite unnecessary violence in the world and would endanger our military men and women that are serving in places around the world”.
The images, apparently showing dead bodies and bloodied and naked prisoners, were taken around the same time as the original Abu Ghraib abuse pictures leaked in 2004, which caused outrage around the world.
The latest images surfaced as Muslim anger against the West is already high over cartoons published in a Danish newspaper and reprinted in other European newspapers satirising the Prophet Muhammad.
Carey said it was a coincidence that the release of the photographs closely followed the uproar over the cartoons as well as anger at televised images of British soldiers apparently beating Iraqi youths.
“We got these pictures showing an order of abuse higher in magnitude than what appears to have happened there,” Carey said. “To say that somehow or another that we [timed] it on purpose is just bullshit.”
Carey said the new images represent a “quantum leap” from what has been seen previously.
“There needs to be further investigation to find out how those corpses came to be in Abu Ghraib and find out whether they were killed while they were in Abu Ghraib under US care,” he said. — AFP