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Over the last four years, the Bush Administration has used the excuse of war to cover up its activities, hiding what ought to be public information from open view. For the longest time, the Republicans in the White House wouldn’t allow photographs of flag-draped coffins to be taken, saying that allowing such photographs might reveal vital strategic information to the enemy. President Bush sent a message out to government bureaucrats that their efforts to stymie legal Freedom of Information Act requests for public records would be supported by the White House. The number of classified documents has skyrocketed, as the Bush Administration has sought to keep all sorts of public information hidden from the American people.

Always, the excuse was that if the White House shared information with the American people, then enemies might get hold of it and find some way to use the information against the United States in some very creative, implausible, way.

Now, we find out that, all the while, American soldiers have been taking photographs on the battlefield, and uploading them to private web sites in exchange for porn. The photographs taken by the soldiers are of Iraqis and Afghans that they’ve killed. Often, the corpses of the dead Iraqis and Afghans are put into poses for the sake of the camera. Other times, the soldiers are taking pictures of body parts of people who have been blown apart.

This shameful photography exposes the immorality that war encourages - even when the President says that he’s waging war against “evildoers” in order to spread America’s values around the world.

However, here at home, the widespread traffic in two separate wars of corpse photography by American soldiers shows that the Bush Administration’s campaign of secrecy is a sham. When soldiers are taking battlefield photographs and uploading those photographs to pornographers, there is no security of battlefield strategy. The pictures could just as easily be uploaded to web sites surreptitiously run by Al Quaida.

When such images are in free flow from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is absolutely no justification for withholding vital information from the American people. What good does it do to keep the facts of war from American citizens, when pornographers are already getting direct access to the battlefield?

The only security that we can now count on is the security that is enabled by an open government that tells us the whole truth about what’s going on. Fess up, Mr. Bush. No more secrets.

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Postscript: To review some of these photographs of corpse pornography and consider the implications for America’s moral justifications of the Iraq War, read our additional article on America’s gruesome crusade

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