Images, The Law And War.

-- It was a hypothetical question in a Supreme Court argument, and it was posed almost 40 years ago. But it managed to anticipate and in some ways to answer President Obama's argument for withholding photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. What if, Justice Potter Stewart asked a lawyer for The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, a disclosure of sensitive information in wartime ''would result in the sentencing to death of 100 young men whose only offense had been that they were 19 years old and had low draft numbers?'' The Times's lawyer, Alexander M. Bickel, tried to duck the question, but the justice pressed him: [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]