What would you do if you were a publisher or broadcaster and had access to photographs of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib jail? The choice is whether to go public with them or not. The producers of the Australian current affairs show Dateline decided they would.
Their decision met with heavy criticism from one very obvious quarter. The US government claimed the release of the two-year-old images could incite violence and 25 people had already been prosecuted over the events at Abu Ghraib in late 2003. From the same batch as those that broke the story, the existence of these photographs was not a secret. Donald Rumsfeld told a US senate inquiry in May 2004 that they showed "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman".
Dateline was not the only outlet to run with previously unseen photographs. Salon today has a gallery of images on its website it claims are unseen anywhere else and an introduction that makes a spirited defence of their publication.
But it is not just the US government that has doubts.
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