Letters to the Editor
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beheading and Abu Ghraib, etc
I'd like to note that beheadings didn't start happening in Irq until after news of Abu Ghraib broke. What happened to Nick Berg, roughly 3 weeks after the first photos were made public, was genuinely horrible. Nevertheless, the news delivered around the world was just the period to a sentence:
When the Abu Ghraib scandal first made news, many right-wing commentators here said that they shouldn't have revealed the photos, because they would only embolden the enemy, and result in retaliation. They were only half-right-- don't you think, as communities received their sons back, psychologically and physically scarred, bloodied and broken-- or dead-- that they knew? The pictures only served as confirmation.
The way you prevent "them" from doing horrible things to us and ours is by not doing horrible things to them in the first place, whether directly or through proxies like Israel or Pakistan.