The Independent - The photographs have outraged Arab and Muslim advocacy groups in the US and prompted human rights organisations to question whether they are not also a violation of the Geneva Conventions. They also constitute another potential public relations disaster for the United States as it continues to state publicly that it has the best interests of ordinary Iraqis at heart.
Some of the graphic website images are accompanied by openly racist comments from the soldiers who posted them. "What every Iraqi should look like," is the commentary next to a picture of a corpse whose brains and entrails are spilling out. In another image, six men wearing US Marine uniforms are smiling for the camera as they point to a burned body at their feet. The caption: "Cooked Iraqi."
Elsewhere, site visitors are invited to guess which body part is being depicted. The website owner, Chris Wilson, has been quite open about what he is doing. He said his site, which normally features photographs of the wives and girlfriends of his customers in pornographic poses, has proved very popular with the military. About a year ago, in response to complaints that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were having trouble getting their credit cards processed and gaining access to the site, he agreed to offer free subscriptions in return for the graphic images. Those images, unlike the porn, are openly accessible to anyone.
Mr Wilson's site is registered in the Netherlands, putting it outside the purview of the US legal system. He has pointed out that he is not a member of the military and so is not subject to their rules.
It sounds like the evidence in support of this is pretty strong. If it is true I have the utmost confidence that our military leaders will find those responsible for this atrocity and punish them accordingly. Sadly, though, this appropriate response will be missed by the political opportunists among us who will use this incident perpetrated by a small minority of U.S. troops as a way to bring shame to our troops in general. They'll also likely try to extrapolate it into a rebuke of U.S. foreign policy in general.
Which is, of course, nonsense. Any large group of people, however honorable they are as a whole, has its bad apples. Unfortunately, it is those few bad apples that usually garner the most attention.