Salon on why they are holding back

Salon editor Joan Walsh has a piece up replying to some criticisms of their release of more Abu Ghraib pictures. Most of it deals with the total red herring issue of whether they should have also published the offensive Prophet Mohammed cartoons. (Isn't it enough that they linked to them?)

She also has a word to day about why they didn't publish everything they have. Fifty one words, to be precise.

But we have also rejected the notion of a quick and dirty dump of the contents to the Web. Some significant portion of the documents we possess does not appear to relate at all to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and we can see no public interest served by publishing it.

There is also a general tone to the article which says, "We need to research this material more carefully--Be sure it is what it looks like, find out what we can about context--before putting it out there."

Fair enough. But I still have questions. First, who else have they shared these with? The ACLU sued for access to these. Do they have a copy now? (I get the impression that all of this fits on a single DVD.) How about the International Criminal Court? Second, can you confirm Seymour Hersh's description of the contents of some of these videos.

No, Madam Press Secretary, I didn't really think you would answer those questions. I just thought they needed to be asked.