The war is wrong. Men and women who commit such acts are evil. To say those things doesn't come remotely close to saying "all military people are evil" or "Americans are evil" but that doesn't matter, because people read things the way they want to read them.

One way that people distort another person's words to make them fit their worldview, is by adding words like "all" or "none" to twist the meanings, and make things they find ambiguous and unsettling, appear black and white. These things just aren't that simple. Generalizations are sometimes useful, sometimes ridiculous.

Most people want the world to appear in black and white, which is why when people see photographic evidence of something like the Rodney King beating by police, or Iraqi prisoners being tortured by our "heroic" American troops in the same prison where Saddam Hussein's hatchetmen committed horrendous atrocities--that shakes up people's preconceived notions of the most powerful authority figures in our society whom we wish to believe are benevolent, ethical, responsible people.

When we see that the hero myth is so ambiguous, we get upset. We have difficulty accepting the information to be true, even when we are presented with it again and again.

Many photographs do lie, or have been manipulated for effect. Military propaganda in recent years has been relenting in their attempts to heroicize what the troops are doing in our illegal wars in our name.   So when the heroic warrior myth disintegrates before our eyes and turns into a despicable, evil monster, people will deny this really happened, they will try and make it go away with dismissive remarks like "it isn't so bad" or "it isn't as bad as what Saddam Hussein did". And because our guys got caught, these problems will exacerbate anti-Arab prejudices as well, because some will blame the victims.

Does a man who throws a rock deserve to shot and killed? Apparently, there are a few people here who think the answer to that question is yes. But it does beg the question: so why is that prisoner's death been ruled a homicide?

All I can say is, I'm glad we don't have to rely on the ethics of the people in this thread to decide serious issues like this.