Torture photos, required reading:

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The photos were assembled as part of about 200 criminal investigations conducted before and after the disclosure in 2004 of widespread prisoner abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib, the former Iraqi prison that the U.S. military turned into a detention and intelligence-gathering center.

Previously released pictures taken at Abu Ghraib -- depicting Iraqis stacked naked in piles and pyramids, tormented by dogs, chained to beds and placed in other painful or humiliating positions -- enraged many in the Middle East and became symbols of the deeply unpopular U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iraq.

But no commanding officers or Defense Department officials were jailed or fired in connection with the abuse, which the Bush administration dismissed as the misbehavior of low-ranking soldiers.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request in October 2003 for all photographs pertaining to U.S. military detention operations. It filed a lawsuit the following year after that request was denied.

Last September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ordered the photographs released. The Bush administration challenged the ruling, but the court denied that petition in March.

Amrit Singh, the ACLU lawyer who argued the case, said the court ordered the release of 21 photos taken in Afghanistan and in Iraq outside of Abu Ghraib. She said 23 other photos taken in undetermined locations are part of the lawsuit. Civil liberties advocates say that as many as 2,000 other photos could be subject to release.

"There's a substantial number of photographs about which we know nothing," Singh said. "All we know is that some of them depict prisoner abuse."

In an April 23 letter to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Obama administration stated that "the parties have reached an agreement that the Defense Department will produce all the responsive images by May 28, 2009." Press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday that Obama had not viewed the photos at that time.

Last week, Obama gathered White House lawyers and informed them that he did not "feel comfortable" releasing the photos because doing so could provoke a backlash against U.S. troops, administration officials said.

Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, said the administration had been informed that the time to challenge the release had passed. He said Obama had also been informed that the Bush administration had challenged the photos' release only on law enforcement and privacy grounds, and had never invoked a national security exemption to the Freedom of Information Act.

"That's a big fact when you are commander in chief," Emanuel said. "When you have a window that you were told had been shut that is still open, an argument that's never been made and a secretary of defense who is telling you that your commanders on the ground are concerned, you make this decision."

At the end of the meeting, Obama directed the lawyers to prepare a challenge to the photos' release.

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