The Los Angeles Times has published two photographs that show U.S. soldiers posing with the corpses and body parts of Afghans during a 2010 deployment. In one of the photos, a soldier from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division poses with a dead insurgent’s hand on his shoulder. In another, soldiers pose alongside the mangled corpse of a suicide bomber. On Wednesday, the Obama administration condemned the photos, but also criticized the Los Angeles Times for publishing them despite pressure from the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said his department had tried to block the photos’ publication.

Leon Panetta: “This is war. And I know that war is ugly, and it’s violent. And I know that young people, sometimes caught up in the moment, make some very foolish decisions. I am not excusing that. That’s—I’m not excusing that behavior. But neither do I want these images to bring further injury to our people or to our relationship with the Afghan people. We had urged the L.A. Times not to—not to run those photos. And the reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as a result of the publication of similar photos in the past. We regret that they were published.”