I've seen the aftermath of at least one Middle Eastern kidnap-victim beheading. I didn't search it out. The picture was part of a page I was reading. Once I'd seen it, though, I did take a closer look, and it changed my perception dramatically.

        For a while we heard about beheadings and watched the tapes of frantic prisoners almost daily. When we in the West think of beheadings, we have this image of a guillotine, or perhaps a nice large scimitar, cleanly slicing through sinew and bone till the head gently lops off a block and onto the floor or into a nice wicker basket. The reality is far different.

        The picture I saw showed the severed head, and next to it the instrument of cutting -- a common, medium-bladed knife, no bigger than a small hunting knife or something you might use to cut your sandwich for lunch. Go to your kitchen, pick up a small serrated-knife and imagine trying to hack through someone's neck with it while they are still alive, struggling, screaming, feeling the intense pain of their head slowly being sawed from their body. That is the reality.

        Yes, we hear tell of the screams of the victim, the squirted blood covering the walls, but we don't quite get it. That's not the image of it in our heads. We've seen beheadings! There's the fall of an ax, or a guillotine blade, and it's over with one quick slurping sound. Even in the occasional film where a sword is used it hardly takes a halfhearted swing for the head to neatly go twirling off the edge of the screen. So when the news media tells us of a beheading and leaves us to fill in the gory details for ourselves, we are ill equipped to truly imagine the horror of the moment. We're expected to build a puzzle without owning even half the pieces.

        The mainstream news media is in a sense muting the barbarism. They know we won't accurately fill in the pieces they have left out. They lower the volume just enough that we don't get an authentic picture. In so doing, they cheat us and betray their profession. Give us the facts and let us make up our own minds. Leading us to misbelieve, even without a direct lie, is still deceitful.

        The beheadings aren't the only photographed barbarism we have had muted. The pictures we saw from Abu Ghraib mainly focused on Lynndie England's genital pointing or piles of naked men that could have come from some ancient Olympic wrestling match. "What's the big deal," many Americans wondered, privately if not loudly. "So some dumb-ass towel-head got his 2-inch pecker laughed at? Big deal!"

        But there were more photos. There were photos of dead Iraqi men in body bags, dead, possibly murdered, men in the prison, put literally on ice, and American soldiers leaning in, grinning like lottery winners and giving the thumbs-up. These aren't faked smiles. These aren't "I really don't want to be doing this, but I'm under orders" smiles. No, these are the smiles of victory and exaltation. These are the smiles of, "Yeah!! Look what we did!" While not sinking to the level of sawing a living person's head off, these photos captured a barbarism unacceptable from a civilized nation.

        Those are pictures I personally never saw in the mainstream American news media. I can't help but wonder why. Just as I can't help but wonder why a culture so often thought to be in love with violence and steeped in blood needs its barbarism muted. Or why, if our culture has become as barbaric as some claim, we can't manage to properly fill in the parts left blank.