how one justifies the photo's

barbara starr, cnn's pentagon correspondents take on the abu ghraib photo's on 'good morning america', aired February 15:

Let's start by reminding everybody that under U.S. military law and practice, the only photographs that can be taken are official photographs for documentation purposes about the status of prisoners when they are in military detention. That's it. Anything else is not acceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is all about. Australian TV now broadcasting a series of photos and video, additional material that has not been widely distributed to this point, although certainly the U.S. military has known for years ...

The material we're about to show can be quite disturbing. But it is out there. Three of the photographs clearly do appear to show abuse. Let's look at some of the pictures that we have now. The reason we can say that these appear to show abuse, there is no apparent reason obviously for such photographs to be taken by U.S. military personnel of those they are holding in detention. So we're going to show you just three photographs at the moment that fall into this category of clearly apparent abuse. They are not documentation photographs. They clearly show people in circumstances in U.S. military detention that they should not be in, by all accounts. ...
source
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.marchforjustice.com/3.22.php