6 Members of Elite Navy Force
Sue News Agency Over Photos
New York Times
By TRACIE ROZHON Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page
16,Column 5
Article published Dec 29, 2004
Six members of the Navy Seals and two of their wives sued The
Associated Press and one of its reporters yesterday for
distributing photos of the Seals that apparently show them
treating Iraqi prisoners harshly.
One wife had put the photos on what she believed was a
password-protected Web site, a lawyer for the group said. The
suit, filed in Superior Court in San Diego, charges The A.P. with
invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional
distress. It does not name the plaintiffs.
An Associated Press article on Dec. 3 about the photos said
they had date stamps suggesting they were taken in May 2003 -
months before the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq
that led to investigations of abuse of detainees.
In one photo published by The A.P., a gun is pointed at the
head of a man who appears to be a prisoner; another shows a man
in white boxer shorts, with what looks like blood dripping down
his chest, his head in a black hood. In another, a grinning man
in uniform is apparently sitting on a prisoner. The faces of most
of the prisoners are obscured, but those of their captors are
not.
James W. Huston, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said
yesterday that since the photographs were published, the men's
lives had been put in danger and their wives had received
threatening calls. Mr. Huston said the photos had appeared in
Arab news media and on anti-American billboards in Cuba.
The lawsuit demands that The A.P. obscure the faces of the
Seals members if the photos are published again. Even if The A.P.
agreed to shield the faces, Mr. Huston said, he would still
pursue damages.
Mr. Huston said he did not know how The A.P.'s reporter got
the photographs. "Obviously they were not as safe as she believed
them to be," he said of the Navy wife, adding that she was not
available for comment. The wife had put the photographs on Web
the site as a kind of backup storage, her lawyer said, "and
planned to go back and organize them or delete them later."
The A.P. reporter, Seth Hettena, discovered the photos on a
Web site called Smugmug.com while researching another news story
on alleged brutality by members of the Seals, according to an
A.P. article on the suit. The site lets members display photos in
password-protected or public galleries.
Reached at The A.P.'s San Diego bureau, Mr. Hettena said he
could not comment on the suit or the photos. Dave Tomlin, a
lawyer representing The A.P. and Mr. Hettena, said, "We believe
that the use of the photographs and the manner they were obtained
were entirely lawful and proper."
When Mr. Hettena first showed the photos to the Navy, it began
its own investigation. The Navy found that some of the
photographs were not exactly what they seemed. For example, the
gun pointing at a prisoner had a light on the end of it and was
apparently being used to illuminate a prisoner's face, said Cmdr.
Jeff Bender, a spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command in
Coronado, Calif.
Other photographs were not as easily explained, Commander
Bender said. "The picture with the guy grinning ear to ear," he
said, referring to a shot of a Seals member posing between two
hooded prisoners. "These kind of pictures are supposed to be
taken strictly for administration and intelligence purposes."
A follow-up investigation is about halfway done, Commander
Bender said. Jeffrey D. Neuburger, a lawyer specializing in
technology and communications issues, said that "the photos
are clearly newsworthy, and as a result, the First Amendment
would protect their use" by The A.P.
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