On January 18, 2017, the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York ruled in ACLU v. Department of Defense that the Department of Defense must release a collection of photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison and other military detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. Army personal between 2003 and 2005. In support of his ruling, the judge stated that “the executive has failed to articulate the reasons supporting its conclusion that release of the photographs would endanger Americans deployed abroad.” The litigation surrounding this case began thirteen years ago through ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents that included the photographs at issue.