Oh, but they were released thanks to Australian media, and in any case The One surely knows he’s likely to lose the court fight to keep them suppressed. Then he can blame the judges and wash his hands of the whole matter. Patience, lefties, patience. There’ll be plenty of time for Iraqis to get good and angry again. Or will there?

Darraji didn’t know there were more pictures of abuse by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad until a reporter told him on Friday, and he doubted that their release would lead to more attacks.

“Nothing would happen,” he said. “This is a very old issue, and we Iraqis have seen much worse than just photos.”…

Harith al Obaidi , the head of the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in Iraq’s parliament and the deputy chairman of the Committee on Human Rights , also shrugged off the Obama administration’s concerns over the photos.

“The people who want to express their opinions through violence are already trying their best to do so,” Obaidi said. “Showing them a few pictures wouldn’t make them any more able to do it.”

As for Stewart’s suggestion that enhanced interrogation must be wrong if we’re so eager to prevent photos of it getting out (the Abu Ghraib pics aren’t related to the CIA program so far as I know, but never mind that), we can recycle the Hiroshima question that Cliff May dropped on him to answer it. If, as Stewart later conceded, Truman wasn’t a war criminal for ordering the bombing, isn’t it nonetheless true that photos of children dead in the aftermath would have stoked anti-American sentiment among the Japanese? However you come down on waterboarding, the question of whether it’s necessary/proper is largely independent of the question of whether it’ll make people angry. The latter’s a factor to be considered, but only one factor. Not that difficult.

Credit where it’s due, though: He’s spot on about Dan Choi.