Editorial: The horrors -- and truths -- of war
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta listens to a question about photographs published in the Los Angeles Times of U.S. soldiers posing with dead Afghan insurgents, during a joint news conference with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Brussels (April 18, 2012). Credit: AP Photo
Photos of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with the severed body parts of dead Afghan insurgents have once again confronted the public with the sort of atrocities that war unleashes.
The U.S. military must do all it can to make such outrages vanishingly infrequent. The incidents depicted in the images the Los Angeles Times printed Wednesday took place in 2010, but now the military has launched an investigation. That's only a first step.
Top military officials asked the newspaper's editors not to print the photos, noting they would become anti-American propaganda for Afghan insurgents. Publishing them was the right thing to do. And if the newspaper hadn't, the Internet would have beckoned as a ready alternative. Their dissemination should help keep the military focused on ensuring discipline and professionalism in its ranks.
The disturbing photos showed U.S. soldiers posing on one occasion with the severed legs of a suicide bomber, and on another occasion with the hands and mangled corpses of three insurgents killed when a roadside bomb they were preparing detonated. Their publication came just three months after a video of four U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses appeared on the Internet.
The images are painful, but war is a brutal business. The public shouldn't be shielded from its horrors -- even those committed by our own people in uniform.
