So Philip Gourevitch Can See the Torture Photos, But We Can’t?

There’s nothing like the elitism of the elite media.

In the Sunday Times Week in Review section, Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review, defends Barack Obama’s decision not to release the torture photos.

In the process, he reveals that he himself has seen some of the photos.

“I saw many more pictures than were ever published in the press, including, I believe, many—if not most—of the photos that president would now prefer that you don’t see,” he writes.

He can see them, but we can’t.

He then congratulates himself for not including the photos in the book he wrote about Abu Ghraib on the debatable grounds that “most of the worst things that happened at Abu Graib were never photographed.”

He parrots Obama’s line that release of the photos would “enflame America’s enemies and endanger troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.” But all he musters by way of argument is, “There’s no doubt about it: The policies that the photographs depict have already done terrible damage to America’s cause.”

What’s the logic of that? No one in the press should have published the Abu Ghraib photos?

Besides, if Obama came clean, released the photos, apologized to the world, and then vowed to prosecute not only the torturers but those at the top—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and the lawyers who wrote those memos at the Justice Department—then it’s quite possible that the release of the photos would do more good than harm.

But Gourevitch insists that “releasing additional photographs would not be telling us anything that we don’t already know.”

I’m not sure about that, either.

Cheney just gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute where he heaped praise on the U.S. interrogators. If even one picture showed a U.S. interrogator doing a hideous thing to a detainee, Cheney’s position would be severely undermined.

And since Cheney is Torquemada right now and his popularity is perversely rising, it would be good to have the photos out just to steer us away from his neo-fascist dungeon.

Oddly, Gourevitch wants to focus attention, he says, on those “at the top of the civilian chain of command in Washington.”

Releasing the photos would do just that.