Abu Ghraib and Seymour Hersh: Do we have a right to know?

In class yesterday, we touched on a man named Seymour Hersh who helped uncover the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, and who recently uncovered the photos of interrogations from  the U.S prison in Iraq, Abu Ghraib. This got me thinking, do we need to know that things like this are going on? Do we have a right to know these things? Should we even know about things like this, or is the Government protecting us four our own good? I looked through a few of these photos, and they are... disturbing at the least. I'm not sure I wanted to know that U.S troops are doing things like this to prisoners, or if anything worse than this is happening. There are pictures of people chained up in tiny cells, people who are mutilated, and men with hoods over their heads who are made to stand on tiny boxes or face electrocution- this is a method of interogation. Part of me has feels like the public has a right to know what is going on in Iraq, and that freedom of press should not be abridged, as it is one of our country's core values. But part of me thinks that the public doesn't need to know about Abu Ghraib and the ilk until after the war. I'm really torn on this, what do you think?