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Some of ya'll probably are already aware of the "US soldiers posting photos of dead and/or mutilated Iraqis on a porn site" topic working it's way around the 'left' blogosphere recently.

This Reuters article on Yahoo! is a fairly sterile summary of the topic (why the so-called 'liberal' media would be treating this with kid gloves is beyond me).

Less sterile accounts can be found here and here (no photos at either link).

I haven't visited the porn site to see the photos for myself but given my reading of the descriptions I concur with Tom's comment last January that "this stuff will haunt your nightmares for weeks."

While I'm well that aware that I'm possibly projecting my own journey onto the nation as a whole, soon after 9/11 - when it became clear that we were going to choose the path of violence - I developed the opinion that as a nation we've yet to face our shadow.

We've had opportunities to face it since then (most notably I think via last year's Abu Ghraib prison photos, but let us not forget the ones which haven't been released yet) and perhaps some of us are coming to the realization that Our Dear Leaders and Our Troops and are not all Noble and Good but I suspect we still have a ways to go. It is within the framework of that opinion that I interpret these reports.

Whether or not anyone else agrees with me as a practical matter I cannot see how all but a minority of people can deny that this is not good for the troops in Iraq. Even if 95% of the American public is blissfully unaware of these photos, I'd say the odds are that 95% of folks in the Middle East are.

It's for this reason that I'm surprised by the apparent effort by the U. S. Army (as reported in the Reuters article above) to pretty much ignore this. I mean if there are photos showing

men, with their faces visible and wearing what looked like U.S. military uniforms, standing over a charred corpse, mutilated dead bodies and severed body parts.

it seems to me to be quite a stretch to believe that the Army

has failed to determine whether U.S. soldiers provided grisly photos of people killed in the Iraq war to a porn Web site

I realize that in this digital age that the authenticity of photos should be questioned, but based on an e-m I received this week, which did contain some photos (with the graphic bits blacked out), I think Occam's Razor would suggest that the photos are legit and not part of a massive hoax.

So I'm left wondering, why would the Army and our nation's media be so interested in downplaying this issue? Do they really believe that in doing so we (the troops in Iraq as well as the American people) are better off? more