Firstly, The horror of the experience for the individual victim must be unimaginable. The shock experienced by loved ones deep and unbearable. Whatever may be my values regarding this needless and messy war, My heart goes out to those who suffer first and worst.

It is difficult to understand the motivations of those who cold-bloodedly inflict horror. To become hardened to the act of inflicting such experiences face to face with the victim raises serious questios about beliefs and life experience. What has happened to these men that such brutality comes easily?

I am reminded that tens of thousands of black Americans are still waiting on Death Row for courts to determine their fate. Maybe the injection is less nasty than the Electric chair, shooting or the gas chamber, but years of imprisonment and active imagination must be a similar acute horror and dread.

Those of us non-Americans who watch the US gun-culture at its murderous work, with children butchering each other at school, worry that the world's policeman is becoming as dehumanised as many of those they police in their overseas wars.

War dehumanises its practitioners. Abu Ghraib, The twin Towers, Hioshima and Nagasaki, and this string of brutal executions all tell the same story.

                                  Jack Halyard