Over the weekend, 15 people were killed in Nigeria and another 11 in Libya as the engineered violence in response to the rather tame Muhammed cartoons continued to claim lives. In a case of bad timing, my paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, published an incredibly lame justification for not having published any of the Danish cartoons that have resulted in dozens of deaths and millions in damaged property.

Most readers who e-mailed us say the cartoons should have been printed because they were news. The Union-Tribune, they said, failed to serve its readers by deciding not to print the cartoons. These readers dismissed concerns about exercising freedom of the press responsibly and concerns about offending Muslims.

Some who objected to the Union-Tribune's decision not to show the cartoons said the newspaper has printed images that offended Christians, so why not print the cartoons of Muhammad?

On Thursday, I heard from readers who chastised the newspaper for not publishing the cartoons yet printing an image showing prisoner abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison three years ago. The photo was one of many being aired in Australia.

Union-Tribune Editor Karin Winner said the comparison is misleading. “The abuse photo from Abu Ghraib prison depicts a facet of the atrocities of war, a war that we started and is the subject of heated debate in households across America. The cartoons are the result of a newspaper flexing its freedom of the press rights for shock value purposes.

“As the story lingers and lives are lost, the news value may reach a point where we will find it necessary to show our readers what started it all.”

This column was likely written Thursday of last week and went to press early Saturday morning. This attempt to assuage readers that the Union-Tribune may eventually find these cartoons newsworthy enough to publish if enough people die was made before this weekend's deaths in Nigeria and Libya. Frankly, it's a very week justificiation. The violence and protests spurred by the cartoons were newsworthy enough a couple weeks back to be the main centerpiece on A1, but the paper will publish them when more people die? Cynical readers have no doubt already started calling Reader's Representative Gina Lubrano asking exactly how many people must die before the paper decides the "news value" threshold has been reached. 50? 100? It's a sick exercise, but one that the paper has invited upon itself.

Readers are also right to complain about the double-standard regarding the paper's publication of years-old Abu Ghraib abuse photos and these tame Muhammed cartoons. Publishing the original photos a couple of years back was completely justifiable -- the government was moving slowly to punish the abusers and public outrage definitely hurried the process along. Publishing "new" old photos now has relatively little news value. The news value certainly pales in comparison to that of the cartoons.  I showed the cartoon in this post to one of my colleagues who had not seen the cartoons on Saturday and she thought I was pulling her leg that it was one of the cartoons sparking this violence. While she already thought the protests were silly, she also thought that the cartoons were much more outrageous -- even after I'd shown her the more "disrespectful" ones.

The Union-Tribune has done an impressive job in the past couple of years covering the debacle that is San Diego city government and uncovering the Duke Cunningham corruption, but it, along with many other American newspapers, has erred in this case -- and the explanations and justifications only make the mistake more blatant.