By the time you read this, maybe we will have seen all the pictures from the Iraqi prison scandal and will not have to endure another shot of a grinning guard sitting on top of a prisoner who is sandwiched between two stretchers.

That’s a hope, not a prediction. Even as he apologized about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned the world that we haven’t seen all the photographs, or even the worst ones.

Still, the images trickling out have been horrific: a naked prisoner down on all fours while a guard holds a leash attached to the man’s neck; a pair of naked prisoners, one with his back to the camera and another seated between the man’s legs in a suggestion of oral sex.

Such images defy words.  

A citizen of Saudi Arabia searched for a way to express his shock and found a parallel in this nation’s history. He reportedly told the New York Times, that the pictures reminded him of photographs from a lynching.

Too harsh?  Go to “Without Sanctuary,” an online exhibit of postcards and photographs collected by James Allen.

Browse through postcard after postcard of smiling, even laughing crowds posed in front of charred bodies hanging from trees. Pause at the photograph of a naked black man standing before the camera documenting the final minutes of his life. His cuffed hands barely cover his genitals. A back view shows the scars and welts from the beating he’d received before his death.

See if you don’t flinch at this picture just the way you have probably flinched at their 21st century descendants from Abu Ghraib.

True, these aren’t the nods to lynching that have come from the Iraqi war.

We also remember pictures of a huge crowd rejoicing over the burned corpses of four Americans killed in Fallujah.

That photograph replicated many of the images in Allen’s collection. So why didn’t it stun us in the same way as this latest crop of photos?

The reasons rest on who we think we are, and who we really are.

In the Fallujah photographs, the Americans were the victims who died in support of a noble mission: bringing democracy to a Middle Eastern country.

Because we cast ourselves as saviors, we could place that tragedy in a religious context. It reinforced our belief that we, of all nations, always stand on the side of right.

The abuse scandal strips us of that illusion. The American guards are the perpetrators, arguably no better than the minions of Sadaam Hussein. Instead of uplifting a vanquished people, they are humiliating them.

And the guards are enjoying it immensely.

That fact, I think, is one of the most disturbing similarities between the old lynching postcards and the photographs leaked from Iraq.

There is no solemnity, no appreciation for the enormity of the situation captured by the camera. There was no sense that the Americans were engaged in a dirty business.

Instead, the guards are mugging as they point to the prisoners, posing and laughing as if at football game, or hanging out in a bar.

They were having fun. Big fun.

Some analysts have suggested that the snapshots were part of a propaganda war, tools to demoralize the insurgency and demonstrate the power of the American forces.

I’m not buying that. Those pictures were meant for albums and scrapbooks. They were souvenirs, just like the postcard of a “barbecue” — the burning of a black man — held in Tyler, Texas during the early 20th century.

In reflecting on his lynching postcards, James Allen noted that the photographer was more than a perceptive spectator. He insists the photographic art played a role as significant to the lynching ritual as torture was.

He could just as well be talking about the images from Iraq, for they were made with the same intention: to reveal the faces of the enemy and the substance of his villainy.

And they do that. They do that very well.”

Afi-Odelia E. Scruggs