Everybody knows that this is just the tip, and we know it just as assuredly as we know that Dick Cheney's energy committee included Ken May and other industry crooks and that the minutes of these meetings would clearly show the early planning to invade Iraq for its oil. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to come to that conclusion.

It's amazing that these photos were even taken in the first place. What was the reason for recording these vile acts? Were the photos to be used as pinups in lockers or some sort of sick porno page on the Internet? And why were they released, and by whom, just as our forces surround and are poised to raze the two cities of Fallujah and Najaf? Another folly that can bring nothing but more hate of Americans.

It's also obvious that these sadistic acts were not limited to the infamous prison we've rebuilt and put back into use, the very same prison where Saddam and his sons did horrible things to their own people and is just one of many prisons we've rebuilt before essential infrastructure like providing water and sanitation. These prisons now handle citizens who, since our invasion and occupation, are our responsibility, people who are now under our care and stewardship.

Some of the photos show rapes being committed in open fields with mountains in the background while other television pictures show that these backgrounds are definitely not part of the inner city Abu Ghraib prison grounds.

Apologists and other commentators with the moral fiber of a cockroach are trying to make us believe that while this was certainly ignoble, embarrassing, humiliating, and "abusive" behavior on the part of some of the boys and girls in our military – it wasn't "real" torture. Or that these pictures came from surveillance cameras that are part of every cellblock even though anyone who has ever taken a family picture can tell by the angle that this isn't true. These pictures were proudly posed by sickos. No one can sanitize that.

In the understatement of the year some military officials have said that these acts "might provoke a backlash" in other Iraqi communities, in all Arab countries, and the rest of the world as well. How astute.

But there truly is something worse than these pictures portray, much worse. So far, we have a picture of only one prisoner who died from "abuse," and I suppose they'll tell us that he was oversensitive, a real wimp, but what we are not getting is pictures of the thousands of innocent civilian men, women, and children killed by our own weapons of mass destruction.

We are shown plenty of rubble, but what do you suppose cluster bombs, depleted uranium bullets, stealth and C-130 bombers, apache helicopters, Bradley fighting machines, MOBs, tanks and other expensive hi-tech weapons do to people, insurgents and civilians alike? We only see pictures of this in the green light night vision lenses of night time raids covered by "embedded" news people from a safe distance. The same sort of pictures we got in Clinton's 1998 bombing of Baghdad narrated by the Secretary of the Treasury's daughter-in-law. Nothing up close and personal, even of the aftermath, at least not until the bodies are removed.

And this is not to mention the half million children that died of malnutrition during our embargo. Well, after more than a decade we finally stopped hammering them over the head with that one, so they must feel better now, right?

Don't forget that we're talking about the nation that once had the best health care system in the Middle East. Today we've shot at the ambulance trying to return Jessica Lange after saving her life and currently refuse to allow ambulances into Fallujah or other cities under siege. Are those just a few isolated instances carried out by a few deviants or more examples of broad and specific orders coming through the chain of command?

Meanwhile, we are making a hero out of Tommy Hamill, the Halliburton truck driver that miraculously "escaped" after being held hostage in a desert shack by two insurgents with automatic weapons who didn't bother to tie him up, treated the forearm wound he received during capture, and didn't "abuse" him.

If the media devoted half the time to covering the Iraqi dead and interviews with survivors and relatives that we are devoting to this "Wag The Dog" hero, the American public might have some idea of what's going on in Iraq.

The Iraqis are bulldozing their soccer fields to bury their dead in mass graves while our fearless leader, the man who lives a stone's throw from Waco, tells us that we must stay the course until stability is achieved and in a prepared press conference on April 13th told us that "We are not an imperial power ... A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world ... I fully understand the consequences of what we are doing, we're changing the world." Sound familiar to those who remember Hitler's speeches? Today Iraq – Tomorrow the World.

Even the Vietnamese are drawing comparisons between what happened to them and what's happening in Iraq. Seems we've traded dehumanizing "gooks" for dehumanizing "ragheads" and our troops, our children and grandchildren whom we all love, are developing rationalizations that they are not shooting humans in order to preserve their own sanity in a situation where they can't tell who is the enemy and who is an innocent civilian.

Do you understand what a "debriefing" is and what it entails?