As everyone in Hollywood knows, you need to ratchet up the violence in the sequel to get the attention of people after the first show.

I don't think these photos will move needle in terms of people's outrage, they will be dismissed and downplayed as before by Hannity, Rush and lesser hosts like San Francisco's own pro-torture theocon, Brian Sussman on KSFO. (http://s88172659.onlinehome.us/2005/06/brian-sussman-why-dont-you-want-to.html) In fact, the very act of showing them will be seen as treasonous by the likes of O'Rielly. Instead of asking why did this happen they will blame YOU for fanning the flames.

I think it will take the videos of boys being raped (which we were told existed.)to make people readdress this issue. To stand up against the torture apologists (and there are a lot of them, sadly) we need to point out the number of people who should NEVER have EVEN been in Abu Ghraib. I think that for every radio host that jokes and says that they are all terrorists who are trying to kill us, we need to identify the non-terrorists who DIED from TORTURE. Yes almost two dozen Iraqis were TORTURED to DEATH. Somehow that little statistic seems to get ignored when shown photos of "harmless" stress positions and men with underwear on their heads. According to the army's own reports

"There were five cases of detainee deaths as a result of abuse by U.S. personnel during interrogations... There are 23 cases of detainee deaths still under investigation..."

--The Schlesinger Report, August 2004

Based on the Taguba report, the Red Cross report and yes even the photographs themselves, clearly more than seven military police were involved.

"The new reports not only decisively prove what was long known, widening the circle of direct blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib to nearly fifty people, including military intelligence soldier and officers (although subsequent disclosures suggest that the number is at least twice that.)"

--Mark Danner, Torture and Truth America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror. p. 27

The fact that this was tamped down to a few people convicted "on the night shift" is astonishing. Photographic evidence PROVES and signed documents SHOW that more were involved than were ever punished.

Must we have a notarized photo of Donald Rumsfeld raping, torturing and killing an Iraq who was rounded up by mistake to get people to take this seriously? Because by signing the military orders and putting in place his policies, he is responsible for those actions as surely as if he committed them himself. To state otherwise is to deny the existance of the military command structure.

I remember during the first Gulf War, when Iraqi draftees couldn't wait to surrender to US forces. I don't think that will ever happen again. People talk about the lives of captured Americans that will be lost, but that's the smaller part of it. The bigger part is we'll have to fight our way through from now on, because even conscripted civilians will fear us. So many more will die because of this.

The question is not why the "new" images from Abu Ghraib should be published now. The question, rather, is why they were not released to the media when the first set of images surfaced. By attempting to keep these pictures under wraps, the military and the government practically ensured that the scandal would come back to haunt them in the future. Attempted cover-ups tend to generate their own come-uppance.

Bravo Salon for publishing the images. As an exercise in free expression, it certainly beats commissioning and printing puerile insults in the name of journalism.

Lame. Your moralizing self-justification for publishing these photos is pathetic; I'm willing to wager it's all about increasing your subscription base (I won't be renewing mine, by the way). Since you are such a courageous bunch, why don't you publish the Danish cartoons that have provoked violent outbreaks among Muslims, or is the world only entitled to see certain types of provocative graphics (i.e., those that embarass the United States). There's a reason conservatives so often refer to liberals as "hate America first-ers."

Salon,

I heard NPR's interview with your editor on my way to work this morning. It appears to be a self serving excuse for dredging up an old news story. The only possible reason I can see is that Salon and the Australian source is looking to incite further violence against our troops in Iraq. If you look at the way an ill-informed, under educated Islamic "man in the street" has reacted to cartoons depicting Mohammed can you defend rehashing the Abu Graib photos as responsible journalism?

Your pious little group can rest easy in your beds tonight knowing that the brave men and women of the U. S. military are protecting even you. Oh, by the way, when one of these brave men and women are killed by a homicide bomber after looking at your rehash of old news, wring your bloody hands for them.

Daniel O. White

The majority of Salon readers are Americans.

We did not draw the Danish cartoons. We did not publish them. We did not riot over them. They have nothing to do with us. We don't actually need to see them to get the idea "these cartoons offended Muslims so much they set things on fire."

Don't get me wrong. I think the Muslim behavior toward those cartoons is reprehensible. But, you know, it was reprehensible when Ayatollah Khomeini put out a fatwa on Salman Rushdie's life, and I didn't actually need to read "The Satanic Verses" to know that it was reprehensible (I tried. Couldn't get through it.) Nor did I have any moral obligation to do so since it wasn't like my tax dollars put Khomeini in power (unless you count our gross stupidity in propping up the Shah as long as we did, but we were not directly responsible for Khomeini and his fatwa.)

This is different. My tax money paid for people from my country to do this to innocent people and people who'd committed no more serious crime than car theft. If they'd been terrorists this still wouldn't have been right, but the horrifying thing is that the vast majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib are INNOCENT. I grew up being told we were better than the Communists because the Soviets did these kinds of things, "disappearing" innocent people to be tortured or killed. Later I found out that we sponsored states who did the same thing, but at least, at *least* we were not doing it directly, we were not the hands on the guns. Now we are. And we have a moral obligation to look at the horrors we have allowed to be wrought in our name.

It is not necessary to show pictures of al-Zarqawi beheading Nick Berg, because we didn't behead the guy -- we're trying to kill al-Zarqawi (incompetently, but at least now we're trying, unlike before the war.) And saying "well, why don't you show people being beheaded" conflates two unrelated things. al-Zarqawi isn't even Iraqi and he certainly isn't in Abu Ghraib. This is kind of like trying to do a history lesson on ancient Rome where you talk about the first Christians being crucified or thrown to the lions and somebody goes "Well, now you have to teach about the Inquisition!" Yeah, okay, Christians committed the Inquisition, but other than that the two are not related. The murder of Christians in ancient Rome had nothing to do with the murder of innocent people by Christians in Spain 1400 years later, and the murder of Nick Berg and other innocent foreigners in Iraq by Muslim terrorists from countries other than Iraq has nothing to do with American torture of innocent Muslims in Iraq except that Muslims and Americans are involved in both cases, and physically both crimes took place in Iraq. That's trying to create "balance" where there isn't any, except in the minds of racist right-wingers who think "Muslim = terrorist" and so Jordanian terrorist al-Zarqawi is exactly the same as an innocent Afghani taxi driver that we tortured to death or an Iraqi car thief who got swept up into Abu Ghraib and was tortured by us because he kind of looked like he might be a terrorist, since, you know, he looked Iraqi.

We need to see these pictures. We need to see them, and we need to demand accountability from our leaders, and those that have already proven they will never support accountability, we need to pursue every legal means at our disposal to get them the hell out of power, whether that be voting the bastards out, demanding their prosecution or resignation, or getting them impeached.

I am not anti-American. I love my country. But I love my son, too, and if I found him tormenting a smaller child just for fun, I would want to know and I would punish him to teach him never to do that again. If the American government won't learn not to torture people without a spanking from the American people, then we who love our country need to deliver that spanking at the ballot box this November and in letters to our Congresspeople and to newspapers and in any other legal way we can.