What I thought of, straight off, as I watched that 17-minute WikiLeaks video of Iraqis – including a Reuters photographer and his driver – being strafed on a Baghdad street in 2007 by a U.S. helicopter, was a book of postcards published a decade ago.

The book, compiled by James Allen, is called Without Sanctuary. My guess is that you don’t have it sitting on your coffee table. The postcards and various other stained, frayed photographs – about a hundred of them – depict mostly black men, a few women, a few white men, in the process or aftermath of being lynched in the United States, in the first half of the 20th century. The dangling or burned corpses are surrounded, in most of the pictures, by grim or smirking or benevolently smiling onlookers, some of them children. It’s the most surreal and troubling historical document I’ve ever seen in my life.

It’s a stark testimony to the devaluation of human life, and this is its thread of commonality with the video, which – justify it if you will in the name of war, rail as Defense Secretary Gates did that it’s “out of context” – records helicopter crewmen chuckling in exaltation as they kill a dozen people (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”), including the driver of a van who was trying to rescue one of the wounded.

When ground troops discover two wounded children in the van, which had been taken out with armor-piercing shells (“Look at that, right through the windshield”), one of the helicopter crewmen comments: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle.”