Please consider creating a special mini site that serves the entire batch of media. It is necessary to disseminate this information on the internet as quickly as possible. Some would criticize the opening of old wounds here, but it is necessary for the American public to realize that they have been lied to about the extent of the abuse and also the higher officials' roles in all of this. The more you show the better. I have seen the Australian dateline report. It says it has received images via the ACLU's successful freedom of information act request. If all the U.S. media sources have these, why are they not printing them?

I thought we were better than this.

This makes me so, so sad.

Thank you for publishing these. We need to know the truth.

Was Salon sitting on this story/images? Did you decide to publish because the Australian Dateline show already broke this story wide? If so, why?

Sir,

The treatment of the prisoners was vile and reprehensible. I do however wonder whose agenda is being followed by publishing this kind of material and what/whose purpose it serves. It strikes me that our self-flagellation will ultimately be very detrimental to the preservation of our the rights and freedoms.

Perhaps these kind of photographs should be balanced by the photographs and video's of the beheading of the various captives in Iraq and the aftermath of the suicide bombs in London, Madrid and the daily carnage in Iraq itself.

Yours

Thank you for publishing these photos. I hated looking at them, and they are my tax dollars at work.

I've written letters and emails to my elected representatives. Everyone seems to agree that the situations depicted in these photos are reprehensible, that they are the antithesis of everything the United States claims to stand for. Still, the only people who have been held accountable for these crimes are low-level military, young men and women who seem to have believed they were following orders. Orders from whom? And if not from their superior officers, where the heck were those officers? And why haven't the civilian contractors been held accountable as well?

What is the matter with this country, that we can see these photos and then send a few scapegoats off to jail and consider the matter closed?

Publishing the photos is a good start. How about publishing some ideas about how we can DO something about this? I'm out of ideas.

In the California prison health care system, an average of one inmate per week dies of neglect or malpractice. The situation is described as "anarchic" and "macabre."

So Abu Ghraib is not some anomaly of wartime stress. There's no bombs going off in California.

We can't let this go again. I have heard nothing that convinces me that further abuse is not taking place elsewhere. The same policies that allowed for this sickening abuse are still in place. We cannot allow this issue to be brushed aside again. As much as I hate looking at those images it is necessary that they be seen. It reminds us that we are not discussing "hypotheticals" these are real human beings. This is real torture. This is being done in our names. This is not for freedom. This has nothing to do with protecting our country. This is what happens when human beings are given unbridled control over others in unmerciful enviroments. This is why the persons in positions of authority must be held accountable- it is part of their jobs to prevent this. This is why we need to respect the Geneva connventions. This cannot keep happening and it will if we let the issue slide away. We can't let this go again. These are real human beings.

Cruelty, violence, murder...this is part of who we are as a species. This is part of what Americans, like their predecessors, are as an imperial power. Not every individual, certainly, and not at every moment, but the numbers are not few nor the occasions rare -- particularly in the institutions of organised state force like the police and military. Anyone who is surprised at CIA and military behaviour at Abu Ghraib or Bagram or Guantanamo must either choose to ignore history, recent, ancient and in between, or has swallowed too much of the mythic exceptionalism that America feeds its populace so they won't look too closely at the price that their affluence and militarism wreak on large parts of the globe. Look at the centrality of rape, crime, and murder in US entertainment. Look at the hellish conditions that flourish in US prisons, and are accepted as normal. The list goes on.

But we're more than that, too. The struggle against this universal condition of human psychology and sociology is fundamental to most civilisations. The US, swollen with arrogance and power, is not the most successful at this enterprise. Its press, the opposition Democrats, its religious institutions, the preponderance of civil society, are not currently very engaged in this struggle, either. I don't think things will change much until a confluence between popular culture and opposition to Bush occurs. Then it will be someone else's turn.

there is no doubt in my mind when I look at these photos that the men in them were put into these positions specifically to humiliate them and enrage them, knowing what I do about Middle East sensibilites. How incredibly poignant and heartbreaking it actually is to look at one of the photos and see a naked man, head covered, with his feet tucked under him in what I recognize as being the way men in the Muslim world sit while in prayer. I'm sure that the brutal and un-feeling guards at Abu Ghraib would never have recognized such subtleties among their charges, since it is clear from these photos that they didn't even perceive these people as humans. I guess what is the most shocking aspect of this is how far we, as a nation, have fallen from what our founding fathers and mothers intended. To paraphrase those prophetic words by Thomas Jefferson: "And I shudder for my nation when I consider that our God is a just one."

Julia Cosentino Konmaz

Istanbul, Turkey