I assume you know about the new series of "problems" that has emerged in relation to American treatment of Iraqi prisoners and corpses. There is the Human Rights Watch report detailing systematic abuse of prisoners. And there is the online porn site that features sexual pornography and images (with enthusiastic commentary) of mutilated Iraqi corpses submitted to the site by American soldiers in Iraq. If you don't know about this, just visit AMERICAblog and feast your eyes. The Pentagon has declined to investigate the dissemination of these images. Anyway, Digby makes an important point about the relation between prisoner abuse and pornography:

'I am not a psychologist but I think it would be very surprising if combining these arousing sexual and violent images did not result in twisting some people's psyches. It cannot be healthy to get your thrills through deadly, bloody violence and sexual images in the same place, at the same time in the same way. The porn site is a "girlfriend and wife" site --- it's not professional porn stars. Those images of the naked girls next door are being given away for free to men who are posting pictures of mangled bodies of people they purport to hate with every fiber of their being. It is worlds colliding in a very dangerous way.

Sexual sado-masochism has been out there for millenia but it is highly ritualized fantasy. This is all too real. I have to think that it is problematic that people are getting so negatively and positively aroused by real death and gore at the same time.

There is something very disturbing about the images of sexual torture we've seen and heard about in this war, generally. The forced masturbation, the pyramids, the female interrogators and the fake menstrual blood, the constant nudity, all of it. Violence against prisoners in the new Human Rights Watch report is expressed as "fucking" instead of beating. Not "fucking up" or "fucking with" --- just plain "fucking" as in "I walking in and saw him fucking the prisoner." '