I just can't get out of my head how angry I am at the photos out of Abu Ghraib. How damaging they are to us, our people, the mission. Images that will burn themselves in the retinas of people around the world. I have no illusions about apologies to "the Arab World" doing any good at all, or even that these photos truly made things worse. They hated us at unprecedented levels already remember? But do we really need to hand them more ammunition?

Now my feeling is that everyone has responsibility in life. Responsibility for what they do and for what they don't do if they should have. Just as shouting, "Well, look what they did to us" is not a satisfying excuse for the images we have seen, because our guys are responsible for themselves and their own actions, not the actions of the bad guys, so too does everyone involved in this crisis in color have to look at themselves and their actions, too.

No one doubts how damaging the images themselves are. It's a given (for most) that what happened at the prison (and possibly elsewhere) was bad enough, and it was being investigated and dealt with. You have, for the sake of argument, thousands of people - the prisoners themselves and their families - in some way affected negatively toward America if they weren't already. But they had no photos and no proof to show.

So then the pictures come out. Suddenly you have a huge multiplying effect as people all over the world see the images...well, I won't belabor the point, we all get it now.

Back to responsibility. There's plenty to go around isn't there? The soldiers themselves, their commanders, etc...yes, even the criminals who committed their own crimes and atrocities that led to people ending up needing to be questioned in places like Abu Ghraib and risking innocent neighbors being caught up with them.

So what's bothering me? I can't get the question I asked earlier out of my craw.

My opinion? Whoever leaked the information is as guilty, if not more guilty of evil acts as those soldiers shown in the photos. At the very least, they have their own brand of responsibility. Pointing a finger at the people in the pictures is just another way of taking the focus off of that fact. To their credit, CBS did apparently at first accede to requests not to air the pictures, although that didn't last long.

Seymour Hersh has been one of the media trolls who's career highlight was exposing the My Lai massacre. He's been one of the worst offenders in the Left's taking a turn on the fire hose to try to fill up the media-created quagmire in the days following September 11th. He's the "class design" of that brand of expose artist who sees it as a virtue in and of itself to oppose our government regardless of, or maybe in hope of, the greater consequences to the American Community.

Mudville Gazette has a couple of interesting items you should have a look at. Here and then here.

Hersh was the journalist who broke My Lai. Chip Frederick, the guy in the photos who's now busy as hell trying to point fingers at his higher-ups to get himself off the hook for his own actions has a lawyer with a history - Gary Myers, who formerly defended Lieutenant William Calley...of My Lai fame. Now, is he the source of the leak? Who knows, but desperate people do desperate things. One of the first things they teach you in Basic Rescue and Water Safety is never to get in front of a conscious, drowning man. He'll pull you right down with him in desperation.

Now, Hersh himself only bears so much responsibility on his own shoulders. You can't blame a skunk for stinking, and there's certainly a value to having journalists like Hersh out there on the prowl. It keeps people on their toes. Further, he probably wasn't the only one with the info. But I sure would like to know who's been letting the info out. Who's the source? Who's Deep Throat?

Of course, there's another actor here who bears a measure of responsibility - history itself. In these days of ubiquitous digital photography and electronic documents, visual secrets are awfully difficult to keep.