On Wednesday, the British army released the first torture photos of prisoners at Camp Breadbasket in Basra, Iraq. The photos showed British soldiers stepping on prisoners, forcing them to simulate anal sex, and one tied up man was carried by a forklift around the prison yard -- apparently to "get him out of the sun." Though the scale of the scandal surrounding Operation Ali Baba appears to be far smaller than the US military abuse affair at Abu Ghraib, it is still deeply disturbing -- and it dominates the thoughts of editorialists at major German dailies on Thursday.

"These photos are repulsive and cannot be explained or excused," writes the center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. The paper predicts they will be disastrous on two fronts. "Firstly, in Iraq itself, where they will be used by radicals and terrorists who have no interest in the stabilization of the country," it writes. But also back home in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Tony Blair's "war is already very unpopular anyway and where elections are soon to be held." It concludes that the photos and "their suggestive power cannot be easily dismissed from the election campaign, even by the political finesse of someone like Blair."

The editors of the left-leaning Die Tageszeitung express similar contempt. "How many bad eggs do you need to find in order to describe the entire basket as bad?" the paper asks rhetorically. As the wrongdoing comes to light, the paper says, everyone from the generals to the tabloid press is chastizing the "bad eggs" who did this while at the same time praising the military in general. Whoa, the paper suggests, wait a minute! "There were at least 20 soldiers standing around when the abuse took place. Not one of them reported the incident. The torturing egg in the British fair-play basket is a myth." The paper then ridicules the British press for its apparent hypocritical superiority in its reporting of Abu Ghraib. "No one can be surprised about this abuse scandal," it concludes. "The soldiers are even very brutal to each other as emerged last autumn when it was revealed that recruits at British army barracks had been systematically tormented, humiliated and even raped. What can be expected when such people are sent off to war?"

The editorialist at the conservative Die Welt is also outraged, but also flummoxed by the bizarre exhibitionist aspects of the case. "These images take your breath away," the paper writes. "Why do people who have shed their inhibitions to such an extent also feel the need to document their conduct with photos?" It then waxes philosophical: "What use is all the dogma from leaders in Washington and London if not every soldier is absolutely immunized, indeed indoctrinated, against such degeneration?" But the paper praises Blair for his swift reaction and his carefully chosen words. "It is good Blair immediately found the right words: 'The difference between democracy and tyranny is not that in a democracy bad things don't happen. But that in a democracy, when they do happen, people are held and brought to account.'"

Meanwhile the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung plumbs the deep well of irony in the mess the British have found themselves in. In a rather opinionated article, reporter Bernhard Heimrich argues that the scandal has hit a particularly sensitive spot with the British army because "they believed that their occupational force was 'more civilized' than the American soldiers, who have just been trained for raw war." In the British-American relationship, he argues, there is still the "condescending idea that the British are to the Americans what in ancient times the Greeks were to the Romans -- a civilizing corrective." Now this self-understanding is being painfully dissected in a former Nazi Wehrmacht barracks in Osnabruek of all places.