The photos that emerged from Iraq last week – showing American soldiers exulting next to naked Iraqi prisoners forced to adopt humiliating poses – are a disturbing piece of visual evidence that America is its own worst enemy, says Philip Kennicott, and only the stark reality of a photograph was able to bring that fact home to us. “These photos, we insist, are not us. But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals… [but] great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals… Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours.”