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The issue of releasing those photos has me in a cognitive dissonance more perfectly balanced, more difficult to find my way through than any conundrum in my recent memory. It's as difficult for me to answer as the "strawberry or chocolate?" question was when I was six years old (I'm not making light of a serious issue here, the ice cream question really was a "Sophie's Choice" in reverse as far as I was concerned).

I feel these photographs absolutely need to come out, that we need to bring to light virtually everything that was done at those prisons and other "black sites." (fat chance of the latter, of course) We need to prosecute everyone involved. Doing so is the only way to even begin making amends and to assure the world we will not do this ever again.

(he turns his baseball cap backwards)

I feel these photographs should absolutely not be released -- at least not while we have a couple hundred thousand soldiers standing in the very countries where publication would, at the least, unquestionably foster the recruitment of jihadists who hadn't previously planned on fighting. Worse, and more importantly, their publication would cause the deaths of many people on all sides -- I DO NOT believe those who say, "we don't know for sure if that would happen." That's crazy-talk to me. The question in my head, then: is releasing these gruesome photos now worth the deaths of innocent Iraqi and Afghan kids as well as young American soldiers? It seems every time there is a battle fought or a bomb dropped, a 100 civilians die for every soldier on either side.

Would the release of the photos really spur the average person in the U.S. to be pro-active one way or the other, or would the photos simply be grim and gratuitous pornography printed in mainstream magazines to slake the morbid curiosities of the otherwise indifferent -- while the sickos on the far right pin the images to their walls and take deep satisfaction at the humiliation of their enemies?

But if we don't release these photos, if we don't expose the horrors which were committed in our names, then the thing will occur again and all too soon. Without releasing ALL of these photos, those Americans who are philosophically on the fence may fall to the right and adopt the American exceptionalism attitude that without question was responsible for this mess in the first place...Dick Cheney, you fucking asshole.

I remember a rather un-funny joke from the early 70s; I was far too young to understand what it meant, but I'd laugh along every time my father told it -- and he told it a LOT. "What's the ultimate mixed emotion? It's when your mother-in-law drives off a cliff in your new Mustang." Years later, I came to fully understand why my father enjoyed telling this joke so much, but only after I started telling the thing myself