Iraq seethes after new abuse footage

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - New images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison prompted Iraq's president to condemn his close ally the United States on Thursday, demanding harsh punishment for "savage crimes" as Iraqis seethed over more humiliation.

In unusually strong language, Jalal Talabani was critical of Washington as the new images were digested by Iraqis and other Arabs already enraged by insulting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad which were published in European newspapers.

"We have condemned these savage crimes. We reject that a civilized country allow its soldiers to commit these ugly and terrible crimes," Talabani told reporters.

"We demand very harsh punishments against the perpetrators."

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman played down the reaction over the images, saying they were not new and that the perpetrators had already been brought to justice.

"There aren't new allegations, they're old allegations. These aren't new photos, they're old photos. These are photos that were part of the evidence in the prosecutions that took place," Whitman said.

Just so that we're clear, the media has no problem publishing (and in some instances re-publishing) old inflammatory photos from an old story in which there has been no new developments, yet they refrain (for the most part) from publishing the Mohammed cartoons out of "respect for Islam" and a desire not to add any "fuel to the fire." That these Abu Ghraib photos may well throw some fuel on the "fire" in Iraq just doesn't matter to them, I guess.

I'm fine with the media running these Abu Ghraib photos. That's ok. They're news. What I'm not ok with is the way they seem to be publishing them just for the sake of stirring up trouble, especially given the lame excuses for not publishing the Mohammed cartoons they've bandied about