speaking of graphic photos...

...Rolling Stone just published a group of very disturbing images from an army unit in Afghanistan informally called "the kill team". From The New Yorker's coverage of the story:

The slide show of newly released “Kill Team” photographs on Rolling Stone’s Web site begins with an all-black slide with bold, white letters almost an inch high declaring, “WARNING,” and the message “The following photo gallery contains EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING IMAGES of violent deaths. Viewer discretion is advised.” No such warning precedes the accompanying piece, by Mark Boal, about the American soldiers on a mission to murder unarmed Afghanis.

Read the rest of The New Yorker's posthere. This post, along with Seymour Hersh's report on "The Kill Team" (which you can read here), are relevant to ROADKILL's investigation of the ways in which we can become desensitized to violence.

From Hersh's post:

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us.

Rolling Stone article here.
Rolling Stone slide show (VERY GRAPHIC) here.