Last week's widely distributed images of mutilated corpses in Fallujah sparked intense debate among media observers about the ethics of showing such images.

To some, however, that debate focused too much on the images themselves and not enough on the underlying issues at play in Iraq.

"I feel pretty strongly that we don't stop with an academic debate about showing or not showing the picture," psychiatrist Frank Ochberg said. "That's part of the discussion, but not the whole discussion."

"The events are important," psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton said. "And their importance shouldn't be limited to questions involving their horror, but rather to the attitudes and emotions at play in Iraq among its people."

"There isn't enough effort, I believe, to try to grasp the widespread Iraqi mindset to the effect that we are intruders in Iraq, even for people who had no love for Saddam Hussein," Lifton said.

In interviews with the Dart Center, journalists and mental health experts said coverage of such atrocities should include broader context and more discussion of the political and military realities in Iraq, rather than focusing on the media's own role in the story.

"The news media need to provide enough depth and breadth of coverage to help people understand events and people who are different from themselves," psychologist and author Laurie Pearlman said. "Coverage needs to go beyond 'We're bad, they're good,' or 'We're strong, they're weak.'"

"We're seeing it as a media event," said psychiatrist and author Jonathan Shay. But rather than "having one's gaze directed solely at the atrocious behavior directed at the corpses," he suggested, "the media can do the public a service by adding complexity to the story."

"Spectacular and heinous violence should not automatically be interpreted as either a spontaneous explosion of rage or as a spontaneous expression of an innately vicious society," Shay said.

Lifton, who has written extensively about apocalyptic psychology and war, warned against attributing the violence merely to mob behavior. "There's no doubt that mob behavior played some part," Lifton said. "But if one focuses primarily on mob behavior, one is likely to lose sight of the widespread resentment of Americans as occupiers among Iraqis."

Pulitzer Prize-winning Newsweek reporter Roy Gutman said one question that should be explored more fully is "Why were (the contractors) there at all?"

"It's because there is no security," he said. "It's because the U.S. government and the (Department of Defense) in particular, decided they could engage on the cheap."

It's unclear whether the Fallujah incident could be classified as a war crime, said Gutman, who has covered the issue extensively, primarily in Bosnia (he is currently writing a book about the lead-up to the Sept. 11 attacks). However, he said, "It's a whole series of shameful acts that are crimes by almost any definition."

The rules of war allow an armed, uniformed government agent to kill an armed, uniformed agent of another government. It's unclear to what degree the mob was directed by members of the insurgency; also, the Americans who were killed were technically civilians, but they were performing services usually performed by military personnel. Gutman said the apparently widespread use of civilian contractors performing military functions is an issue that warrants more coverage.

Some observers have questioned whether displaying the images with such prominence simply played into the hand of those who may have orchestrated the attack. Lifton and Shay both agreed that this is a valid concern, but neither thought it warranted not showing the images.

"One wouldn't want to contribute anything to the efforts of those who seek to kill Americans in Iraq," Lifton said. "But having said that, we do ourselves potentially more harm by suppressing these painful events because, if we do that, we blind ourselves to what's actually happening in Iraq and to possible directions of resolution."

Shay said that news media need to put these (and future) attacks in their proper context. The attacks and the desecration, he said, were likely meant to provoke a violent response from U.S. troops. That response, in turn, is likely to further inflame local anti-American sentiment. "This is exactly the same sort of strategy the Vietcong used with immense success in the delta in Vietnam," said Shay, who has written several books about the Vietnam War.

Ideally, Shay said, news coverage should "alert the reader that this is not purely a drama. It's not just passion and it's not just hatred and not just violence. The enemy is thinking here. The enemy is trying to accomplish something. And what is that? And what is the most intelligent and productive response?"

"The absolute worst kind of outcome is where there is a climate where a commander believes he has to act," Shay said. "The result of a commander allowing the enemy to write the script with theatrically atrocious behavior basically gets more Americans killed and more Iraqis killed."