BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, Army Reserve PFC Lyndie England, infamous for her appearance in photos holding a leash with an Iraqi prisoner on the other end, was brought before a military judge, who threw out her guilty plea and declared a mistrial. A year ago last week, on 60 Minutes II, and in the New Yorker magazine, Americans first confronted what has come to be called "the horrors at Abu Ghraib," and ever since, the American Civil Liberties Union has worked to keep the story of prisoner abuse on the front page. It's hard to put new spins on what amounts to the same dismal story in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, but the ACLU has been helped by a Freedom of Information Act request filed long before the Abu Ghraib pictures went public. When that request was ignored, the ACLU sued, resulting in waves of fresh documents detailing abuses. Emily Whitfield is the ACLU's media relations director. She says ACLU lawyers scrutinize every document for potential news stories.

EMILY WHITFIELD: The court has ordered the government to deliver 8,000 pages to us every two weeks. That's a lot of material. Our process has been - we want as many readers out there and, and people in the media to pick up this material and tell the public about it. So, we have our lawyers on staff analyze the material and find what we think are the most newsworthy, and unfortunately, sometimes the most gruesome parts of it, about abuses to prisoners, fingers being poked into their wounds, having their hair ripped, having their genitals grabbed. Unfortunately, that's the kind of thing that does grab people's attention, and in this instance, it should.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So when you have, every two weeks, 8,000 pages to go through, you look for headlines.

EMILY WHITFIELD: We do look for headlines, and then what we do is we analyze it, and we make an index on our website so that people can easily click on the sections that we're talking about, and I can't tell you how many reporters have called up and said "Thank you for doing this. This is incredible. I can't believe the kind of material that you're getting." And so, from the time we started getting material on October, 2004 until very recently, Brooke, that was working very well for us.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So it used to work really well for you. What's happened since then?

EMILY WHITFIELD: Well, what changed in March was that the Army probably figured out what we were doing and realized that we were making headlines in this way, and the issue was staying before the public, and that's something that, clearly, they were not happy about. They'd been ordered by the court to give the documents to us first so that we can take a look at them, so they started, instead of releasing the material to the ACLU, and letting us do our thing, they started giving the material directly to certain select reporters, and at times of the day and times of the week, when it made it very difficult for anyone to do a decent story.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You mean the classic document dump late on Fridays, when people are getting ready to go on vacation?

EMILY WHITFIELD: Oh, you got it. That's right. I had one New York Times reporter call me up at 3 o'clock and say I've got to haul over to the Pentagon on the Metro and pick up a huge heavy box of documents, and then I've got to go through it. Who knows when he's going to be able to write his story? I have to say, reporters have nonetheless done a very good job of also finding those nuggets of, of salient information, but it just makes it a lot harder for us to present it to the press and to the public, and it's been clearly deliberate on the Army's part.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So that's how the Pentagon may try to sidestep the ACLU. How about in dealing with other reporters?

EMILY WHITFIELD: Well, I know of one case, I talked to reporter Seth Hettena with AP in San Diego recently. He covers the Navy SEALs down there. And he had been googling on the web for - looking for information about the Navy SEALs, and he came across one of these photo-sharing sites called SmugMug.com, and on it were photos of Navy SEALs sitting on detainees who had been handcuffed and, and doing things that looked to be abusive, and certainly raise questions about what was going on. He wrote a story about those photos, and he published those photos. The Navy SEALs' families turned around and sued him for distress and for damages, and not only that, but then the Navy itself patented the photos and turned around and sued him for patent violation for publishing the photos.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ex post facto?

EMILY WHITFIELD: Yes!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How did that suit go?

EMILY WHITFIELD: Well, I think that's still ongoing, and what Seth told me was that his lawyers were planning to file what they call a slap suit, which is a suit alleging that the government was using the lawsuit in a retaliatory fashion. They weren't seeking justice; they were seeking to shut him up.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: While the ACLU has been requesting documents from the Pentagon, you've also been requesting photographs. Is that because you think that photographs are, are simply part of the record, or that they help make stories stickier? The Abu Ghraib story obviously stuck in the minds of Americans because those pictures were so gruesome.

EMILY WHITFIELD: Well, we do think it's crucial to get photos for that very reason, Brooke, because the Abu Ghraib photos really galvanized the public around this issue, and it made them understand in a way that no American of paper documents ever would what exactly was going on over there. We know these photos exist. We know these videotapes exist. The Army certainly knows it. And they are desperate not to have them released. I can tell you how desperate. The Army recently argued to the court in trying to resist releasing these photos that to release photos of prisoners and videotapes of prisoners would violate the prisoners' Geneva Convention rights, which [LAUGHTER] is just so ironic, it's, it's hard to believe. It's - and it's so shameless, because of course these are photos that the soldiers themselves took of the abuses, which themselves are violations of Geneva Convention rights. And we've even said to the Army, look, if you want to cover people's faces so that they're not shown, go ahead and do that - but let's see the photos.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And there's also a story about a video that the government said it wouldn't be able to release?

EMILY WHITFIELD: Ramadi Madness. This was back in March, and they gave us a bunch of documents that included a description of Ramadi Madness - a homemade CD made by G.I.'s which included, according to the description, incidents of G.I.'s kicking people, of hitting a prisoner in the head with a rifle butt who was, who was handcuffed. In, in the documents that they describe, they said they couldn't investigate it further, because they couldn't get their hands on the CD, and that if they were to ask anybody for the CD, it would almost certainly be destroyed, and so they weren't even going to bother. Well, within about six hours of when we put out these documents that we got, the Palm Beach Post got a hold of the CD. The visuals from that weren't particularly compelling, because they were very blurry, they were very dark - but just when you saw the, the heightened interest in that, and all of a sudden our phones were ringing off the hook - you know that the media out there, especially the broadcast media, is keenly interested in any visuals, and I can't tell you how many invitations to lunch I get and how many phone calls I get from people saying, you know, once you get those videotapes and those photos, I'd really, really like to see them. And what I tell everybody is - I'd like the world to see them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Emily, thank you very much.

EMILY WHITFIELD: You're welcome, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Emily Whitfield is the media relations director for the ACLU.